HN credibility just dropped 80% to me for the moment ;-)
No but seriously, this is pretty bad. Many people are kind of addicted to HN and to many this is a stream of inspiration. I've seen people often share posts in internal Workplace chats where most people are not frequent HN readers.
Also having learned today that one can buy Reddit upvotes, I think this whole count thing is now officially useless.
Don't assume that those upvotes are counted. It's a cat and mouse game. We eat a lot of mice.
If you or anyone suspects that a post has made HN's front page because of vote manipulation, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We have years of experience with this data.
I'd never say it never works, because we don't know what we don't know. But I can tell you that many people who've used that spam service have gotten their posts buried, their accounts banned, and their sites blacklisted.
I checked out that page, and at least with this one, it imo doesn't devalue HN credibility for me. The max number of upvotes you can buy for HN on this website is 10 per post, which hardly makes or breaks an HN post.
Those 10 upvotes would only be useful for an initial kick off for a post, but if the post itself is trash and legitimate users don't upvote it enough, it will all go in vain. So it would be kinda impossible to use this service to boost absolutely trash articles that people don't care about it.