So the comments can't be trusted much anymore...
We went post-truth the moment we connected to the internet. Nothing on the internet can be trusted. LOL
Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
21–30 of 117 posts
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#22You can buy literally any platforms equivalent of upvotes. What's special about this? Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.
Nothing special, just was interesting to see. I wonder who the clientele is...
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#23Unsurprising. Now this explains how the Rust posts were getting upvoted to the top so quickly.
Case closed.
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#24It appears the last bastion of free discourse is no longer free. Maybe I’ve been disillusioned all this time but, I’ve always felt HN to be of quality.
I'm not sure it's accurate to characterize HN as "the last bastion of free discourse".
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#25So the comments can't be trusted much anymore...
You should never fully trust something just because it had a lot of upvotes/comments.
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#26Who cares, dang does a great job moderating the site and let me tell you but being on the HN frontpage might get you traffic but will also get you the most savagely honest feedback you can ask for, so whatever. If they bought the upvotes they will either get ignorance or a thread asking what bull shit is this and why is on the homepage or smt like that
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#27It's interesting that the intellectual capacity here at HN acts as a "horseshit detector" pretty much subconsciously. This service does seem to offer a lot of upvotes (50 & 100), which one could argue can be bought to boost a story that has 100 organic upvotes already. But maybe dang has a built-in upvote spike monitor for this. As for /new - it's pretty hard to get by that gate if you're making a blatant attempt of…
It would be interesting to hear more about how HN combats this, though I understand there probably needs to be some secrecy around it as giving away all of the details may make it easier for bad actors to know how to avoid detection.
I don't keep track of this myself but I think dang specifically has said there are some systems in place to combat things like someone launching a product and then blasting it on Slack, Discord, etc. and getting everyone to upvote it.
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#28This would be great if it was itself a scam - some world-worsening grifter plunks down $40-75, the site says "thanks!" then does nothing.
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#29You can buy literally any platforms equivalent of upvotes. What's special about this? Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.
Nothing special, just was interesting to see. I wonder who the clientele is...
Startup VC funded founders who have no clue about community, marketing, or PR, and thus externalise their goals to dubious companies willing to make whatever necessary to reach the goal.
The real hack is knowing the audience hn is comprised of, and creating great content for that audience. There's several great startups doing just that and very finely so too in HN
Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News
#30that's not surprising to me. the show HN feature might bring a product out of obscurity if it hits the front page, so there's certainly an incentive.
True, but: ShowHN rarely makes it to the front page https://randomshit.dev/posts/what-gets-to-the-front-page-of-...