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Comment by villgax | Hacker News Reader

This exactly the kind of Bot problem which another HN post was talking about, the user patwalls recently boasted on reddit/twitter about automating reddit submissions & gaining a boatload of views & is doing the same to HN with clickbait metric laden titles of obscure stuff.

View on HN

This one ? https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/1164708441216077825

Thanks. Enough grounds for flagging this submission.

Why? Looks like he runs a relevant site about startups.

I don't really get the problem with him automating the submission, in fact, isn't that the hacker instinct the site is named after?

I don't appreciate the "throw until it sticks" hustle attitude. YMMV.

I created an automated reminder in my email to share the best stories from my blog to Hacker News, this is not some elaborate bot system.

I'm just one dude running a solo business and need to build automation things like that so I don't forget to post on Hacker News.

I never manipulated votes or anything like that.

> So all you have to do is click that link, and it will prepopulate the Hacker News submit page with everything

> My outsourcing team, in combination with @trypigeon is trained to click that link whenever they see that email.

> And that's how I hit the front page without knowing!

https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/1164708761136553985

And you bragged about being called out in another tweet, which doesn't feel very repentant.

Regardless, this discussion thread is guaranteed to be linked to in all of your future HN submissions that hit the front page and consequently flagged to death, so I hope it was worth it.

If you remember the title of the post, do you mind sharing it?

Tweet https://twitter.com/thepatwalls/status/1164708441216077825

If it gets upped by the community (presumably because it's interesting) what do the intentions matter?

Is it possible to manipulate the upps?

If you follow the link that amrrs published [1], the OP has a team that auto-upvotes all of his submissions. This is explicitly against the HN guidelines.

My interpretation was that his team are pressing the 'submit' button, not anything else.

Submitting a HN link with a URL that was posted recently will give it an upvote.

Per the domain submission history (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=starterstory.com), he does not employ this strategy for all submissions, likely only ones with traction to obfuscate things.

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