Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

goorapid.com

If you troll around in "New" for long enough you'll see threads where some version of this happens - though it's impossible to tell of they are bought upvotes, fake accounts made by the poster, or just friends that were asked to come and post. You'll see some mediocre SaaS thing that's posted here and on Product hunt and a bunch of comments from new users like "Wow so exciting, great job!". They usually get flagged quickly. I have never seen something that I felt was suspect that didn't fall into the really blatant category, so either these guys are really good, or they suck.

It would be fun to use chatgpt to make some throwaway SaaS mvp and then get these guys to promote it to see what the experience is like (and then write it up for HN).

Maybe this very thread is a SaaS ad with bought upvotes?

I worked for a YC company called Anima App [1] that begged us through multiple @here pings to "boost" their posts on HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc... It never really worked on HN, the posts would just get buried, but it did kinda work on Reddit.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/anima-app

I wish I could dismiss this with a snarky comment but it’s probably a worthwhile spend of ~2 minutes of everyone’s time in terms of return.

> 'Design to Code' Startup Anima Raises $2.5 Million in Seed Funding Dec 22, 2022

> Anima, a no-code tool that turns designs into code, raises $10 million Series A • TechCrunch Sep 01, 2021

> Seed

Strangest spelling of bridge I’ve ever seen

Iirc HN has some kind if detection for suspect upvotes - I could guess at algorithms for that, but for obvious reasons I doubt they would share specifically how they do it. It would be a fun data science project to look at the distributions of votes as they come in on stories.

I used to work for a company that encouraged people to upvote their blog, even advising to wait a bit between opening the story and upvoting it (not that I suspect that matters much).

I'd be surprised if that's a unique case.

Isn't this how 90% of the www works?

Site admins should "buy upvotes" a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that's a repeat offender.

But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of "echo chamber." HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

The thing is downvoting isn't that visible on HN due to scored being hidden, just post hiding, which feels useful for bad posts which get it and deserve it (spam, useless comments, and the like)

i use one of those filters that only show me stories that have at least 50 points. i only read those interesting to me, so i don't know if any stories with fake upvotes make it through, but without that filter i'd be overwhelmed.

i suppose number of comments would work as an alternative measure, but that doesn't work for stories that are interesting but don't generate much discussion. and it potentially would just push people to post fake comments instead, creating more moderation work.

I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments.

If you compare the level of “interestingness” of the front page and the first page of new, it’s night and day for me. I still go to new sometimes, but when I do, I feel like I’m doing community service to try to surface the most interesting items for the community.

I mostly meant "upvotes and downvotes on comments" -- as opposed to on topics -- but now I wonder if all upvotes and downvotes could be done away with. Perhaps there's a different way to gauge "interestingness," such as clickthrough rate and comment volume?

HN doesn't have downvotes on topics/submissions, which IMHO is part of the problem. You can only flag. But there are a lot of stories that don't rise to the level of "this is totally inappropriate/spam", but also aren't very good either.

In any case, I don't get the hate for comment up/downvotes: yes, some people will try to game it, but overall, it tends to get good stuff to the top, and is better than having to wade through comments randomly.

Click-through rate optimizes for clickbait titles and controversial topics. Comment volume optimizes for controversial topics as well, since people would be arguing in the comments in those. It also optimizes for comments that don't add value.

HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness. Interestingness is a poor goal, if it even is a goal. For what purpose are we looking for interestingness? "Why?"

I suppose we can start by splitting up introvert and extrovert brands of interesting. Entrepeneurialness for example comes in both pondering alone time and the gathering of crowds.

If we could succeed at creating or uploading a digital dang people would be able to bench their publications in advance and create the SEO click bait hell all over until eventually (like google) success has it that the only remaining signal of quality is how high it was ranked previously back when the algo still worked. Counting click-though is specially terrible there.

Only setting real goals and tuning against exploits could produce hard numbers. It's much easier if the goal is selling a product but even then there is the short and the long game.

> HN was originally looking for user entrepeneurialness.

I don't know what the original site guidelines said, but the earliest version I could find in the wayback machine (July 2, 2014) starts exactly the same as the current content. [1]

  Hacker News Guidelines

  What to Submit

  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I’m struggling to see how HN without voting would be anything other than a simple timeline of posts with comments.

I feel like voting for the content itself but keeping the comments section flat and sorted by time would lead to less gamified and much better comments sections than what we have now.

Maybe keep upvotes around as a positive reinforcement without having an effect on the position of a comment, and obviously mod flagging for things that break rules, but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.

> but upvoting and downvoting being equivalent to "I agree" and "I disagree" leads to users gaming the system to hide things they disagree with.

I've elsewhere said that useful/not useful and agree/disagree should be two different buttons, similar to how LessWrong does it. However, it is a community with even higher SNR and a very different look and feel compared to HN, so I don't know if the same thing would work here.

I read hn through hackernews.com, which is kind of the same? Yeah it's "frontpage" only, but it works well for me. I like to scroll through everything I missed.

It would be more than difficult to figure out a way to do this without a "frontpage" but anyone who cracks that, would have me as a user.

Decentralized hackernews/reddit of the future (which can't do this) will need some sort of weighted vote system...

This is actually the only challenge. Building a [say] p2p search engine is much easier than people think but ranking results is a pain.

I think this is solved by "authenticated atomic action", where users sign individual interactions instead of trusting login servers. In this case, each upvote, downvote, and comment must be cryptographically signed.

Once user action is signed, trust must be assigned to networks of users. (Of course, individual users can be trusted, but it would be easier to manage if users are bundled into networks somehow.)

Key management is the hard problem for this to work. User need to be able to have many keys that are revocable. Blockchains like Ethereum are advocating for chain centralized solutions, but I see no reason why that must be the case. It can be done, from top to bottom, in a totally distributed way. From the blockchain perspective, a "multi-chain" solution is the right one.

Why do you think they'd use the same accounts every time?

They do what works, if using the same accounts works they will do it. If they can use new accounts they will do it. On fb, reddit, twitter, google etc they gradually develop accounts sometimes over years. If those are detected by the tens of thousands it would drive up prices.

Or don't ban the accounts, but secretly build a detector of posts which receive bought upvotes.

Then, don't show such posts on the frontpage.

I suspect Reddit's echo chamber is because of

1. "shadow moderation" (Robert Hawkin's term, see https://www.reveddit.com/#spread_word)

2. "The masses" entered. When the site was smaller, diversity was expected (as well as the average technical proficiency of the users). With larger numbers, diverse thought held by minorities is harder to hear.

It’s hard to attribute Reddit’s rot to voting when it’s had so many years of administration alternating between absentee and inept, and when HN gets such dramatically different results. I generally agree that the trivialization of sentiment is probably a bad thing, but there’s also a lot that works here and one should be careful not to break. I’d certainly be curious to see how it plays out. I wonder if one couldn’t disable voting for only some threads…

Who cares, dang does a great job moderating the site and let me tell you but being on the HN frontpage might get you traffic but will also get you the most savagely honest feedback you can ask for, so whatever. If they bought the upvotes they will either get ignorance or a thread asking what bull shit is this and why is on the homepage or smt like that

An evergreen topic here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

If this worked reliably at these prices, it would be trivial to burn the accounts behind it: you'd just buy upvotes (cheaply, it turns out!) for a marginal story and watch who votes for it. It's most probably a scam, feeding on people who themselves hope to scam the site.

Yea, I edited the title to reflect that it's more of a claim. My B

It's interesting that the intellectual capacity here at HN acts as a "horseshit detector" pretty much subconsciously. This service does seem to offer a lot of upvotes (50 & 100), which one could argue can be bought to boost a story that has 100 organic upvotes already. But maybe dang has a built-in upvote spike monitor for this.

As for /new - it's pretty hard to get by that gate if you're making a blatant attempt of trying to get on the front page. And I think a lot of HN users would easily recall a time they flagged something on /new because it's clearly spam even if it doesn't look like it at first glance.

Now, the irony here would be if this is actually a gamed submission itself and the provider is showing that they can get your story on the front page regardless.

It would be interesting to hear more about how HN combats this, though I understand there probably needs to be some secrecy around it as giving away all of the details may make it easier for bad actors to know how to avoid detection.

I don't keep track of this myself but I think dang specifically has said there are some systems in place to combat things like someone launching a product and then blasting it on Slack, Discord, etc. and getting everyone to upvote it.

You can buy literally any platforms equivalent of upvotes. What's special about this?

Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.

Nothing special, just was interesting to see. I wonder who the clientele is...

Startup VC funded founders who have no clue about community, marketing, or PR, and thus externalise their goals to dubious companies willing to make whatever necessary to reach the goal.

The real hack is knowing the audience hn is comprised of, and creating great content for that audience. There's several great startups doing just that and very finely so too in HN

Votes and fake engagement keeps your post on front page longer, which spurs more organic interaction.

This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.

A warning for people that talking about and linking the reddit votes/user markets while on reddit leads to an automatic sitewide ban.

I lost 10 year old account by offhandedly mentioning it existed in a thread like this criticising the behaviour.

It's weird they don't want to talk about it but I do understand not linking it. There's mod accounts to some very big national subs up for sale.

Would you mind linking it here? HN seems like one of the bastions of free speech, I don't frequent reddit much but I wonder what shenanigans are up there, have seen some wild shit with even companies -stealing- subreddits from the creators lmao

This would be great if it was itself a scam - some world-worsening grifter plunks down $40-75, the site says "thanks!" then does nothing.

HN itself should open up a competitor and do that.

I'm going to use this as an excuse to springboard off on a tangent I've been thinking a lot about.

I think my social media story might be pretty common. Early on, all my social graphs across various platforms were well managed mappings of my real life friends. Today, all my social graphs are a mess. Platforms seem to push to make it easier to discover and find new friends. I want the opposite of this.

I want to have to go through a series of steps in real life in order to add someone to my contact list. I want to classify this friend in some way that acknowledges what the level of trust is. Is this person a casual acquaintance or a trusted family member?

When content is "shared" and I'm receiving it in my news feed, I don't just want to see how many "likes" it has. I want to heuristics on how my personal network responded to that piece of content. And, of course, I want to own that data and I want my hardware to crunch the data. So this could be built in a decentralized way.

This paradigm is far less susceptible to Sybil attacks, such as paid upvotes on a sites like Hacker News. It would isolate us, in a way, from the zeitgeist. But it would connect us more closely with our real world social network.

> But it would connect us more closely with our real world social network.

But the Internet is also the real world, yes? I'm not sure trivialising Internet-based relationships is the solution to a real problem.

Most definitely not, op even gave a direct example.

Also you have to consider what we used to call keyboard kourage. Many people will say things online they never would in real life.

To quote Mike Tyson- 'Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it'.

For me, this loops back to the age-old question "Is there honor among thieves?".

Or, to put it in another way, whose to say that they deliver at all?

The site appears barely functional, their own social media accounts have laughably small follower/subscriber numbers considering what they claim to offer and unless I am mistaken, there appears to be an active effort, beyond the often cited meassure that ensures voting on directly linked posts does not affect the vote count[0], to keep everything honest.

[0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

I'm also selling upvotes.

I pay one upvote per article worth seeing more of. And one upvote for good comments.

Is there a way to identify this behaviour? I am all for a platform which leans in on authentic discovery. ProductHunt and Reddit have long since been lost causes. HN did seem like holding out.

Being asked to defend your work in public and why it's worth being upvoted or talked about is something that folks building should have to go through.

It says you get a certain number of comments also. I was thinking maybe post something innocuous that wouldn't normally get many votes and comments, pay to have the post promoted and track the accounts that comment.

Yes, but the techniques are typically close guarded secrets, to keep the antagonists guessing.

Quick reminder: upvotes are not a proxy for quality.

People vote based on how they feel about a product not on the merit of the product itself. In my experience, votes are about 90% subjective, 10% objective. You will not find someone upvoting something they dislike just because they believe it's objectively true, likewise you will not find someone downvoting something they like just because they believe it's objectively false. Votes have very little to do with the thing being voted on and very much to do with the way the voter feels when voting. It's much easier to act on instinct than logic. There is a nontrivial number of people in this world that never realize the difference between their perception of reality and reality itself.

The most popular things are often the simplest or easiest to digest, not necessarily the best for the given purpose. Popularity is not a proxy for quality.

I paid for the upvotes but this is all I got.

Do you need a receipt for tax purposes?

For a long time, I noticed that, if I made a comment about Windows LTSC/LTSB, it would get downvoted heavily, and that there was a timing pattern to it.

Also, there's a certain set of topics where I can watch the tally go, very predictably -- up, then it gets smashed, and then finally there's some Johnny Come Latelies who vote up again.

Personally, agreement is easy and congruent ("This is correct"); disagreement is quite different ("This is incorrect, and here's why ..."). I think you ought to be able to "agree" with an upvote, but disagreement? That's when words are more useful. Downvotes are too easily brigaded and provide nothing in the way of discussion.

What's actually more accurate is to say that there's a site out there that claims that they will sell you upvotes on Hacker News. Whether that actually happens, where, and how is unsubstantiated (sorry dang). I edited the title to reflect that

Is buying upvotes really effective in the long run? It might give you some short-term gains sure, but it could even backfire as people start to notice that your posts are getting artificially high ratings and lose trust in your content.

Plus, if you're trying to build a genuine community around your product or idea, you need their honest feedback and support to truly understand what they want and how to improve. So, I'd say that buying upvotes is not a sustainable strategy and could actually harm your chances of success on the road to PMF.

There's a big problem with fighting against upvote sales, namely, if you fight too hard, buying upvotes might suddenly become more like buying downvotes, which is an useful service in itself.

If you're too harsh on content heavily promoted by voting rings and content with lots of low-quality comments, posting tons of low-quality comments and making a bad attempt at a voting ring becomes an useful strategy against your competition.

HN is extremely harsh about synthetic upvoting, to the point where, if you have a social circle that looks at your writing before it goes up, you generally have to warn them not to upvote, lest the ring detector bury the story, and to date this notion of competitors burying stories with false flag ring votes just hasn't been a thing.

I ve had a few things hit the homepage here over the years. Did not mean much beyond the good link juice. Did it work out differently for people here?

When my newsletter hits the front page I usually get a handful of signups. When our product page hits the front page it's usually good for a few dozen signups (of a fairly niche product).

A lot of link aggregators / newsletters source from HN as well, so making the front page usually means a trickling of other mentions over the following ~week. Anecdotally these tend to produce less traffic, but have a higher conversion rate.

So all the HN team have to do is to spend the money a few times and see which users always upvote the 'boosted' posts?

YC could offer this as a paid service.

For $100 million, you can boost a post with fake upvotes.

(Hey, it could be the big break that turns into a $1B startup. And the cost to provide this service is high, since YC thrives on reputation, which this erodes.)

Now that it has a price tag, sue others for theft of service.

They do this in an an opposite way . Launch HN and Job postings for startups are the reason why this website exists at all . But now the website is large enough that people will pay to promote things on it. This has replaced my usage of Reddit even before the drama.

I'm not convinced that YC doesn't put their thumb on the scale for YC companies, but whatever the effect is, it's definitely subtle.

You might be joking but it is already offered by YC.

YC-funded companies get special hiring threads which appear on front page of HN.

In terms of backlinks and traffic to website, those should function similarly to buying upvotes.

If your service has any form of gamification, not matter how primitive - you can buy "cheats" for it.

that's not surprising to me. the show HN feature might bring a product out of obscurity if it hits the front page, so there's certainly an incentive.

True, but: ShowHN rarely makes it to the front page https://randomshit.dev/posts/what-gets-to-the-front-page-of-...

That's why we have this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/show

I don't even need a Show HN, I get enough traffic just by posting comments...

> Hacker News consists primarily of these two social news websites, computer science, and entrepreneurship.

Hmm. It's not obvious they've actually visited.

Bah, site is not loading for me. I am curious, what does an upvote cost? Is there time of day/week pricing? Stories vs comments?

I have a yearning to spend the money and use it to boost a post called "I bought this to the top of HN".

Do it. It's just $40, so all you'll really lose is your HN account.

Heh, it is surprisingly expensive. Does it mean HN ecosystem is not that easy to break compared to other sites?

Rule of thumb: If it's cross-posted on ProductHunt the same day it's most likely spam.

The big centralized aggregators seem to be getting eaten by their own success. The way forward is likely the fediverse. Lemmy has gained a lot of traction since the reddit blackout and seems like a good alternative. Could we get enough people to move from HN?

On net, I would expect federation to work out in these people's favor. They won't do anything so obvious as simply run their own nodes which everyone will end up blocking (though that may be a small component of their methodology). But it just isn't that hard to script up some involvement across a wide range of servers, most of whom will not have any defenses whatsoever against this sort of thing, and from there do their thing. What methods get closed out are more than compensated by the vistas that open before them in a federated world.

So... $375 for 500 karma and permission to downvote?

Why am I not surprised?

No thanks. I would much rather people downvote me when they disagree. If all I get is upvotes then what purpose would it serve to be here? That would imply we all think alike which would be silly and dangerous.

I doubt this is being used for comments. Hitting the front page of hn with a blog post or product launch is quite valuable - that's what people will be paying for.

It's not for your comments. It's to promote a post for something that you think will earn you money (or something) if it gets a lot of traffic from HN.

It's pretty obvious the benefit that a poster would get from upvotes. It doesn't take many to reach the frontpage and it's a guaranteed massive increase in traffic to your product.

At $40 for 50 upvotes it's hard to NOT buy upvotes for a small company trying to acquire customers.

It's not for people who post personally to pad their egos. It's for marketing tech products and especially new SaaS platforms, to gain initial traction or give the appearance of an established and active community around it.

There are many tech startup companies that pay for:

1. HN Upvotes 2. Product Hunt Upvotes 3. Github Stars

Why? Because it's all part of their marketing con. For some software companies, they rely on the hivemind to drive the purchase of their vaporware.

Some people would pay good money to make a number on a forum go up.

They shuold try and contact the admins lmao it's just an int in a db at the end of the day

It appears the last bastion of free discourse is no longer free. Maybe I’ve been disillusioned all this time but, I’ve always felt HN to be of quality.

This has been going on for quite a long time. It's just getting worse and worse to the point where more people notice.

I'm not sure it's accurate to characterize HN as "the last bastion of free discourse".

Color me surprised

Very cool article! Very interesting. Much recommended. A+.

(Why the downvotes? The humour was not obvious and on target? Oh well...)

So the comments can't be trusted much anymore...

Well, Just because a thing is possible, doesn’t make it prevalent. I have no data, but I think we’re still fine.

We went post-truth the moment we connected to the internet. Nothing on the internet can be trusted. LOL

Its FBI agents and dogs all the way down.

You should never fully trust something just because it had a lot of upvotes/comments.

I think this service is more beneficial for upvoting posts rather than comments. A link on Hacker News provides valuable SEO for products.

Why were you trusting anonymous comments on the internet in the first place?

Is this real?

Did anyone think this wasn't happening?

Stuff of varying quality lands here and sometimes more than once but does not take off. I have a soft spot for show HN stuff mostly because it reminds me how little I do outside of my work.

I think I give people here a lot more of the benefit of doubt than most other places.

Yes, I think this isn't happening.

You also see it with certain companies that have a very active presence on HN. Any negative comment is downvoted aggressively. Downvoting on HN is rather uncommon, people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down. When it happens with some of these companies you never see that.

> people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down

I’m not sure I agree with this. HN is probably better than most sites, but I frequently see gray comments with no responses.

I'll agree with this. I'll generally downvote if I disagree, and hope someone with a better argument will say what I don't have time/verbage for.

I never downvote based on an opinion, even if I disagree violently, as long as the comment is well reasoned an in good faith.

On the other hand I reflexively downvote everything with even a slight wiff of shilling (especially crypto) or anything boot licking and fanboyism.

I may even upvote comments with which I disagree if I feel they're unfairly downvoted.

I used to see it with cryptocurrency. I suffered a lot of downvotes for pointing out the (finally) well-known flaws with cryptocurrency, and how most of them are (finally other people realize) scams.

Unsurprising. Now this explains how the Rust posts were getting upvoted to the top so quickly.

Case closed.

Just because you disagree with something, doesn't mean it can't galvanize popular support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com