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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"We upvote with very strong accounts; if you don’t make it on the main page after 10 upvotes, more won’t help"

> On Hacker News, when the post is new, it doesn’t matter how much you upvote it after a certain point. After fewer than 10 early upvotes with great accounts, you’ll usually make it to the front page. From there, HN moderators select manually what they want to keep there. A good strategy is to buy only a few upvotes first in order to make your post visible; then, after it remains approved for 10 minutes or more, buy a lot more upvotes in order to rank it better, or help maintain its good position.

Is this actually true? I don't think so.

It also seems funny they offer to sell a factor of ten more upvotes to articles already on the front page. Maybe they'll just sit back and watch it happen regardless?

Well here is a thing. Do these guys expect any repeat sales? I mean, they could try their technique and if it works then great but if either way they still have the money. Is there a rating system where reviews are posted and would it matter if there was? (see https://www.xkcd.com/325/)

edit: Anyway, the mods have access to the database to see who has been upvoting articles onto the front page. If a group of ('high value') accounts upvote in a similar way on a regular basis then they could be detected..

I feel like mods could easily just pay the $2 and create a post for them to upvote. Then detect those accounts and IPs and block them. However, it's likely just a whack-a-mole situation. Perhaps they could shadow ban them instead?

They probably have accounts that match the topics and regularly upvote. So they have some accounts that upvote those entry level ML medium articles, another that upvotes lifestyle Saases, another that upvotes pet language posts, etc.

Is it better for the community to ban the fake clickers with disposable accounts, or to ban the actual people who pay fake clickers to promote their spammy posts, instead? Once you know who the fake clicker accounts are, leave them alone and let them continue to help you identify and ban dishonest self promoters who are trying to game the system to their advantage.

Hell, maybe dang runs upvotes.club himself, so he can take their customer's money then ban them immediately: that would be most efficient and least error prone. As far as I know, buboard might be one of his sock puppets, posting the URL as a honey pot to catch dishonest HN users. ;)

Only problem is that if I don't like you, I signe up and have them upvote the next DonHopkins post.

I think one method is to watch for upvotes that come when someone goes to a link directly instead of organically finding it through /new

I'm starting to understand how all the mediocre metaphysics articles from Quanta and Medium keep ending up on this website. They're the textual equivalent of graham crackers. Just bland enough to not be thought-provoking, but just interesting enough to keep people reading. And with so little to say on the subjects in question, they provoke huge off-topic discussions.

Bland Graham Crackers for Paul Graham's Hackers?

Looking to Quell Sexual Urges? Consider the Graham Cracker. One of America's first diet hawks, Sylvester Graham was certain that sexual desire was ruining society. His solution: whole wheat. How a zealot's legacy lives in our foods today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/looking-t...

Oh god. Imagine the thousands of bland consensus talking points they had to regurgitate to build those accounts. Never trust somebody with no gray comments.

Don't help them :) They can just throw in a few posts disparaging Rust to look credible.

I guess that means I can trust you.

They also need a few warnings from dang for absolute trust.

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