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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

So are there any reasonable methods to combat this?

Is it a legal possibility (regardless of feasibility) to bring charges against people for manipulation of this kind? (Does HN even have a User Agreement? I can't remember if I had to do anything when I signed up)

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Proof of work systems were originally designed to combat these types of 'spammy' behavior.

Give a challenge string and ask the user submitting an upvote to compute a nonce that when added to the string would produce an hash with 10 leading zeros. User submits the calculated nonce, the server computes the hash for challenge string + nonce and the upvote is registered. This makes it computationaly expensive for an upvote provider to submit hundreds of upvotes

I don't think this idea works in practice. Average user has much less computing power available than such services. CPUs are really cheap to rent nowadays, so it would hardly influence the price of an upvote while possibly making quality of experience much worse for mobile users.

Yeah but if you're using a botnet comprised of other people's cpus to submit your upvotes, you already have a distributed computing environment for which you pay zero dollars for computing time. So your cost is still zero.

And the response to that is to make the work have to be done by the human not the machine (captchas)

But that gets user-hostile, so it's not the best idea.

Everyone should be vigilant about flagging content that feels forced trying to convert HN users into newsletter subscriptions, SaaS subscriptions, job applicants, routed through affiliate links etc. If you click the domain name beside submissions it shows you domain history, there's a similar page for users' submission history.

It seems like being on the front page is DDoS'ing them, so that could work :).

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