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Comment by martey | Hacker News Reader

On Apartment List's blog, they are claiming that they asked voters to forward their confirmation emails to them, so that they could confirm votes right before the voting ended: http://blog.apartmentlist.com/the-2012-peoples-choice-webby-...

Based on the dating, it looks like it was posted before this PadMapper post.

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There should be lots of AL users who can produce the exact email plea asking them to

  1.) Read and comprehend complex / sketchy instructions
  2.) Take the trouble to vote
  3.) Not instinctively click the confirmation link
  4.) Actually forward a personalized, coded email back to AL?!?

That also means AL is not disputing that a huge number of confirmation requests ultimately came from their own machines.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- certainly the burden of proof is on them!

(Edit: so far the only AL user to step forward created a new account 3 minutes ago)

Sounds like the kind of story an attorney would concoct after the fact.

Hm, interesting. I asked the Webby Awards to investigate before the voting was over, and this was written around that time - I've just been sitting on it, waiting for more info.

I sort of doubt that that explanation is legitimate, since they didn't publicly ask people to do that on any of their voting campaigns and I think the voting volumes were high enough that a secret campaign using friends of friends wouldn't have been able to cause this kind of swing. The Webby Awards admins would likely have the original voting times, though, and if that's actually what it was, I'd say it was a neat hack.

Well that's interesting. You imply some collusion between AL and the Webby awards. I wonder what the official Webby awards folks will say. Maybe the whole thing was 'fixed' -- and they went dark to just set it to the outcome they wanted? Sounds like the simplest explanation. Anyway, good detective work. Will be interesting to hear how things pan out.

Oh no, I'm not implying collusion. I was just saying that only the Webby Awards have the original voting time data, and that if AL's explanation was truthful, I would be impressed that they pulled that off successfully. Sorry if those two things got mashed together.

Agreed that sounds like bullshit, but assuming they did in fact plan to win the vote in a way which looks exactly like cheating but which turns out to be unorthodox but legitimate, we've got an early contender for marketing gambit of the year.

Heh yeah, I would be pretty impressed if it was legit. The main problem would be getting a large number of people to remember and agree to jump through those hoops instead of just confirming it when they got it. Pretty interesting.

Seems to me you'd lose too many people to "Just Too Hard" syndrome for the strategy to be worth using too.

Yeah, if they don't win a Webby, they still might win a Douchey.

Not just marketing gambit, but mind control as well - people who do this kind of voting aren't going to go for the additional hurdle of redirecting their stuff... yet AL seems to have forced a ton of them to do just that.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Google cached the page on Apr 27 as well with the same content... so it appears Apartment List didn't put up a fake date.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:euCfseP...

Haha, that's the most transparent bullshit I've ever seen.

It's clever that this will explain why all the votes come from the same IP.

Convenient, too for AL.

Where are the Apartment List supporters coming from? They only have around 300 followers.

EDIT: Could it have been Mike Larsen that caused the swing? https://twitter.com/#!/Marleybonez/status/196998708292894720

Seems really unlikely, as there is no mention of the "forward your email confirmation" scheme anywhere related to this video.

There are also only 26 likes on the video; if someone was motivated enough by the video to go vote, there's at least a decent chance that he would like the video as well.

I noticed a lot of those tweets promoting the video contained the word "Advertisement" - anyone know where those come from?

As peer comment mentions, though, there's no mention of the confirmation scheme on that video or the related site (assuming no retconning).

http://spnsr.tw/ kicks you to http://sponsoredtweets.com/ so I'd say it's them.

Ah nice, thanks. I probably wouldn't use that, but it's always nice to find out about the tools of the trade.

A conspiracy involving that many people that did not leak at all? Very unlikely.

That's bizarre. Can any AL users confirm this?

yes I can confirm.

I believe you.

Wait, no.

Screenshot of their call-to-action on this?

Do you know anyone else who can confirm who has been on this site for a while, or at least give some details? No offense, but a confirmation from a user on their first post just after creating the account is not exactly convincing.

If that is true, how did they have any votes up until the last few hours?

people who didn't read/didn't follow the directions.

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