[dang]

The OP seems to have asked early users to vote and comment in the mistaken idea that this would help the post do better on HN, when in fact it's the fast track to getting flagged and penalized. Doing this is against HN's rules, of course. We want people to vote and comment because they ran across something and found it intellectually interesting, not because they or a friend has something to promote.

We have software to detect such violations. In addition, seasoned HN users figure out what's going on and react quite aversely, as you demonstrated. Once such a ring has been identified, if the story is still on the front page, users will flag it (as happened here) or moderators will penalize it. Plus we often ban the accounts and site involved.

This case seems to have been at least in part an honest mistake. More importantly, the tool seems to be of some interest to the community. Because the most important thing on HN is to have interesting things to discuss, I'm going to reduce the penalty on this post and let the discussion continue.

I hope everyone realizes that this is a rare outcome. The more common outcome is that we ban the accounts and sites involved. So please don't do this!