61–70 of 117 posts
YC could offer this as a paid service. For $100 million, you can boost a post with fake upvotes. (Hey, it could be the big break that turns into a $1B startup. And the cost to provide this service is high, since YC thrives on reputation, which this erodes.) Now that it has a price tag, sue others for theft of service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.
Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender. But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.
I paid for the upvotes but this is all I got.
Plus, if you're trying to build a genuine community around your product or idea, you need their honest feedback and support to truly understand what they want and how to improve. So, I'd say that buying upvotes is not a sustainable strategy and could actually harm your chances of success on the road to PMF.
I ve had a few things hit the homepage here over the years. Did not mean much beyond the good link juice. Did it work out differently for people here?
A lot of link aggregators / newsletters source from HN as well, so making the front page usually means a trickling of other mentions over the following ~week. Anecdotally these tend to produce less traffic, but have a higher conversion rate.
I think my social media story might be pretty common. Early on, all my social graphs across various platforms were well managed mappings of my real life friends. Today, all my social graphs are a mess. Platforms seem to push to make it easier to discover and find new friends. I want the opposite of this.
I want to have to go through a series of steps in real life in order to add someone to my contact list. I want to classify this friend in some way that acknowledges what the level of trust is. Is this person a casual acquaintance or a trusted family member?
When content is "shared" and I'm receiving it in my news feed, I don't just want to see how many "likes" it has. I want to heuristics on how my personal network responded to that piece of content. And, of course, I want to own that data and I want my hardware to crunch the data. So this could be built in a decentralized way.
This paradigm is far less susceptible to Sybil attacks, such as paid upvotes on a sites like Hacker News. It would isolate us, in a way, from the zeitgeist. But it would connect us more closely with our real world social network.
If you troll around in "New" for long enough you'll see threads where some version of this happens - though it's impossible to tell of they are bought upvotes, fake accounts made by the poster, or just friends that were asked to come and post. You'll see some mediocre SaaS thing that's posted here and on Product hunt and a bunch of comments from new users like "Wow so exciting, great job!". They usually get flagged q…
Maybe this very thread is a SaaS ad with bought upvotes?
Did anyone think this wasn't happening?
I think I give people here a lot more of the benefit of doubt than most other places.