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Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

goorapid.com

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Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#91

Post by paradite »

neilv wrote: post #46

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.

You might be joking but it is already offered by YC.

YC-funded companies get special hiring threads which appear on front page of HN.

In terms of backlinks and traffic to website, those should function similarly to buying upvotes.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#92

Post by supriyo-biswas »

LexiMax wrote: post #75
sokoloff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

> I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now. Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviou…

> but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.

I've elsewhere said that useful/not useful and agree/disagree should be two different buttons, similar to how LessWrong does it. However, it is a community with even higher SNR and a very different look and feel compared to HN, so I don't know if the same thing would work here.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#93

Post by tptacek »

miki123211 wrote: post #47

There's a big problem with fighting against upvote sales, namely, if you fight too hard, buying upvotes might suddenly become more like buying downvotes, which is an useful service in itself. If you're too harsh on content heavily promoted by voting rings and content with lots of low-quality comments, posting tons of low-quality comments and making a bad attempt at a voting ring becomes an useful strategy against you…

HN is extremely harsh about synthetic upvoting, to the point where, if you have a social circle that looks at your writing before it goes up, you generally have to warn them not to upvote, lest the ring detector bury the story, and to date this notion of competitors burying stories with false flag ring votes just hasn't been a thing.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#95

Post by svnt »

pleaselegalize wrote: post #83
version_five wrote: post #15

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…

I worked for a YC company called Anima App [1] that begged us through multiple @here pings to "boost" their posts on HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc... It never really worked on HN, the posts would just get buried, but it did kinda work on Reddit. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/anima-app

> 'Design to Code' Startup Anima Raises $2.5 Million in Seed Funding Dec 22, 2022

> Anima, a no-code tool that turns designs into code, raises $10 million Series A • TechCrunch Sep 01, 2021

> Seed

Strangest spelling of bridge I’ve ever seen

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#96

Post by Grimburger »

geraldwhen wrote: post #63
tough wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Votes and fake engagement keeps your post on front page longer, which spurs more organic interaction. This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.

A warning for people that talking about and linking the reddit votes/user markets while on reddit leads to an automatic sitewide ban.

I lost 10 year old account by offhandedly mentioning it existed in a thread like this criticising the behaviour.

It's weird they don't want to talk about it but I do understand not linking it. There's mod accounts to some very big national subs up for sale.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#97

Post by vulcan01 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #71
sokoloff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments. If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

Click-through rate optimizes for clickbait titles and controversial topics. Comment volume optimizes for controversial topics as well, since people would be arguing in the comments in those. It also optimizes for comments that don't add value.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#99

Post by gwbas1c »

drumhead wrote: post #72

You also see it with certain companies that have a very active presence on HN. Any negative comment is downvoted aggressively. Downvoting on HN is rather uncommon, people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down. When it happens with some of these companies you never see that.

I used to see it with cryptocurrency. I suffered a lot of downvotes for pointing out the (finally) well-known flaws with cryptocurrency, and how most of them are (finally other people realize) scams.

Re: Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

#100

Post by arp242 »

version_five wrote: post #15

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…

I used to work for a company that encouraged people to upvote their blog, even advising to wait a bit between opening the story and upvoting it (not that I suspect that matters much).

I'd be surprised if that's a unique case.

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