YC has a team of people watching HN in addition to programatic solutions. Turn on "Show Dead" in your account and look at /new and you'll see plenty of people and companies trying to exploit HN.

A site was on the front page last week selling upvotes on HN:

https://upvotes.club/ + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362

I suspect-without-enough-proof that that is the third 'exploit HN repeatedly' business plan I've seen this year, I made a thread yesterday to surface ideas that might be working - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417