[armaxt]

I will get banned for this in a matter of minutes but I will say the truth to whoever think HN is fair. For the past 3 months, every, again EVERY post that was linked to Tailscale (not just the company domain but also the blog posts of the founders' websites), has gotten to the frontpage within minutes, with a full 100% hit rate. This cannot happen for any company, any project or anything else to be honest since there is a thread that gets posted every minute on average, and almost every thread, no matter how great it is, goes forgotten forever without a single upvote. This doesn't happen to even trillion dollar companies that are known by almost everybody so certainly this can't happen for a company of 5 people that was started only last year and hardly known by anybody. Nothing can get to HN's frontpage at a hit rate of 100% especially when you know this has been happening on almost a weekly basis since last December not to mention the daily promotion in comments on literally everything that has anything to do with WireGuard or even VPNs.

HN simply favors some founders who have good network over the rest of us. I know that organized upovting and astroturfing isn't uncommon here, but there has never been anything anywhere near that's being done by this company and its founders here. This is simply free advertising worth of hundreds of thousands of dollars for free simply because the founders "know people".

EDIT: Thank you HN for proving me right! This comment has 42 points as of now and it's buried in the bottom below almost every other comment. Still not a response from the founders who very coincidentally happen to exist literally during every time a post about their company gets submitted!

[dang]

> Thank you HN for proving me right

You've been proven nothing of the sort. I buried your post and the submission itself while investigating this claim, even though you've been trolling HN threads with these rants for weeks now, using multiple accounts to do it, ignoring our requests to stop breaking the site guidelines, and barraging us with ranty emails to boot.

I've looked closely at the data and found no evidence for any of this. Every sentence in your comment is either demonstrably false or completely unsupported.

I know that sometimes a bee gets into one's bonnet, but as I've explained to you a dozen times or so, all we can do is look at the data, and if reality conflicts with what you're saying, we have to go with reality. Actually, I appreciate your underlying concern for the integrity of this site. (Not so much the smears and accusations of corruption.)

Your real sin, though, is wasting our time. That sucks precious resources away from doing what we ought to be doing to make HN better. I haven't had a chance to attend to the front page for the last several hours because I've been busy looking into this, writing about it, and dealing with your posts and emails. Meanwhile other emails pointing out quality concerns in other threads have been piling up in the inbox.

Even though it's tedious, I've assembled a sample of what you've been posting so that readers can evaluate your claims for themselves, and also see how much damage a single disgruntled user can do to this place. In the future, we can refer concerns back here and hopefully not lose so much time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22645796

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587268

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223423

This was a pleasant one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652042

In the past, you've had similar campaigns against other sites and topics, including Go, Kubernetes, IndieHackers, Keybase, DuckDuckGo, Mailchimp, and (yes) the Qataris:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361860

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22329624

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190633

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048852

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22112625

[dang]

I want to add something for fair-minded users who may still be wondering, after all that, whether the interest in the OP really is organic or whether there might be shenanigans. It's natural to worry about this, especially because other users tend to make loud and grand claims about abuse, whether they have knowledge or not.

You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.

Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.

To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they are the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.

Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.

[mtmail]

Good analysis and I can only agree.

I'm a HN user who regularly looks for patterns like connected accounts, weird upvote or comment behaviour in /newest, fake news, bots and reports those to the moderators.

Until today I haven't known about Tailscale, or not conciously remember the brand name. Every past article listed I would've probably upvoted. It fits with the HN audience, just like Docker, ElasticSearch, Cloudflare, gitlab or most polished SaaS companies targetting developers when they release a new major feature. There will always be a commercial/marketing component when companies release something, even more when a founder or employee answers questions in comments. Doesn't mean there's some kind of secret community who upvote each other. Or rather if there was the moderators, once notified, would've found and acted on that.

[kyrra]

My guess? The people involved at Tailscale. Two of the founders (Avery Pennarun and David Crawshaw) are former Googler's that had a lot of respect within the company (I loved both of their G+ posts internally). Brad Fitzpatrick also recently joined them.

They are then building the security model that Google uses[0], but trying to get it to other companies. I think the concept of BeyondCorp is pretty amazing and a great way to think about trust on a network.

Those 2 points together probably gets them lots of upvotes.

[0] https://research.google/pubs/pub43231/

[armaxt]

Again, my argument is simple, how can EVERY post about any certain thing (not just for a _for-profit_ company like Tailscale but in general) can go to the frontpage within the first minutes every time for more than 10 times in a row over the short course of the past 3 months in a website that has the reputation of near impossibility to have your post on the frontpage even once except maybe for SHOW HN threads and where a flood of new threads gets posted every 10 minutes and almost every post gets buried immediately without getting a single upvote even if it was very well written.

[_2d30]

Is there documentation for "EVERY"?

I looked via a simple algolia search for "tailscale" and found relatively minimal posts but also a number with very few upvotes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[dang]

The "every" claim is false. This is a single user's personal war which has for whatever reason gotten trained on this company for the time being, and will no doubt move to some other target, since it's had other targets in the past.

[armaxt]

The "every" claim is correct if you subtract this one exception https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22618517 which happens to be the least interesting post that really won't do much help for the company. Otherwise I stated all links above and you won't reply to it. And the real question that you still won't answer, how many very young/unknown companies have their posts on the HN's frontpage more than 4 times in less than a month with a 100% hit rate? give me other examples so that we know this is really so natural.

[_2d30]

So like not every then?

[armaxt]

my reply is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22762174 not every post about their company contains the word Tailscale in the title.

[api]

I haven't been offended by it, and I'm the founder of a company that's been around longer and is probably the closest competitor: https://www.zerotier.com/

I don't hate on people for doing similar things. If anything I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long, since to me the idea of a full mesh virtual network is how things should work, everything else is stupid and clunky, the fact that we have to bounce off servers to transfer things is dumb, and NAT is pure concentrated evil and must be destroyed.

I absolutely loved David Crawshaw's Remembering the LAN post:

https://crawshaw.io/blog/remembering-the-lan

It echoes exactly the sentiments that motivated me to start working on ZeroTier, so I wish them well.

As far as the upvotes go I just figured they have a lot of friends from their time at Google and their posts get upvoted a lot.

I notice the same thing when any company that has a lot of HN users among its employee base does anything. When AWS, Apple, and Google do a bunch of product releases the front page gets bombed for days. The site practically turns into a news feed of new AWS Elastic Beanie Cap products when the ironically titled AWS ReInvent happens. If anything the FAANG companies get more free advertising here than anyone.

[apankrat]

> I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long

Because it's really hard to monetize it. Speaking from the experience.

Edit - This particular bicycle gets reinvented on regular basis and in a nearly identical form. While technical details are difficult, the overall idea is rather simple. Rendezvous servers to coordinate the setup and NAT traversal + relays to handle the edge cases. The tricky part is the UX... but it's still nothing compared to monetization. Very few end users will pay for this, because if it "just works", it doesn't look like something worth paying for. Smaller companies will pay, but they don't realize they need it. Larger companies realize the need, but they won't touch 3rd party managed VPNs with a long pole. It's really quite a pickle. But the tech is beautiful :)

[api]

I disagree. It is challenging to monetize, but so are many other things.

I'll give what I think are my reasons:

- It's "easy" to do a proof of concept here, but it's brutally hard to make it really work well and at scale. There are a lot of buggy NATs, highly restrictive firewalls, etc. Network virtualization, which is what you need for it to be general purpose rather than app specific, is another layer of difficulty.

- It's hard to do it securely. Anything that gets popular will get attacked a lot and has to stand up against that. It's easier to secure centralized systems against most attacks for multiple reasons.

- The dominant paradigmatic fads from 2004-2019(ish) were cloud and mobile. Cloud obviates the need for this (in exchange for all privacy and freedom), while early mobile devices and mobile data options were too wimpy to do P2P. The latter is still a problem but less so today than 5-10 years ago.

- Most P2P software has had poor usability, slowing its adoption.

- The cryptocurrency bubble sucked all the air out of the decentralization room, causing the entire notion of P2P and decentralization to get conflated with CoInZ. That seems to be ending.

[apankrat]

I disagree that it's "brutally" hard, but to each his own.

The main issue is that the need is not well-defined and there are competing solutions that aren't as technically elegant, but as robust and as easily deployed. Competing with them on _P2P_ basis only is really hard. The only real technical benefit is lower latency... and even that may not hold true in aggressively shaped consumer networks. It used to be possible to get a bit of an edge from having near-zero hosting costs, but that's been far less relevant for a while now.

[api]

Things often seem easy to those who have done them already, but it's definitely hard for the vast majority of developers. It's also very hard when you try to do it at scale in a way that's enterprise-friendly and reliable.

[dfcarney]

(Tailscale co-founder here). I also loved Crawshaw's post. It really took me back, though I certainly wasn't doing the kind of hacking he was.

I, for one, really appreciate the nod. I agree our motivations align and I look forward to hearing more about what you and team come up with. All the best on things at ZeroTier.

[camgunz]

Eh, as a datapoint in the other column, I'm genuinely interested in whatever bradfitz and apenwarr are working on. It could just be general fame.

[arcticfox]

I upvote everything about Tailscale because I love it and any information that comes up about it. If it wasn't for my long and boring history on HN, I'd probably look like an astroturfer to an algorithm.

[symplee]

Should the list of who upvotes an article be public?

When I make a comment, my username is displayed. If upvotes and their timestamps were public, it would make it a lot easier for the community to get to the bottom of any funny business like OP is describing.

[TechBro8615]

This is a great idea, but will never happen because all the YC founders would be against it for obvious reasons.

EDIT: Slightly altering it a bit. What if only the first 50 upvotes were public?

[dang]

It will never happen, but that's not the reason. The reason is that voting data is an extremely intimate reflection of users' feelings and beliefs. None of us would want that picture of ourselves to become public, and I shudder to think of what people would do to each other with the information.

[TechBro8615]

I agree with this. But do you think only showing the first X votes could help resolve it? If you want to keep your upvote private, don't upvote if there are < X votes.

[dang]

That would discourage people from upvoting new stories, and sites like HN already struggle to get enough attention on the /newest page.

[api]

Everyone knows the site is partial to YC companies. It's an open secret. I consider it part of the "trade" in exchange for running a decent board without any ads or surveillance monetization. They're doing this for a reason, and it's to pump their brand.

Hell they could just tag articles related to YC companies with a special color and pin them for a bit. I'd be fine with that.

[dang]

I'm not sure why you're feeling like this is secret when we make a point of explicitly disclosing it, and always have. In fact, haven't you and I had exchanges about this years ago?

There are three formal things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it: (1) job ads, which appear on the front page and later on https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs; (2) Launch HNs for YC startups, which appear on the front page and later on https://news.ycombinator.com/launches; (3) YC alumni usernames display in orange to other YC alumni (though not to themselves, which has led to a stream of emails over the years).

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

We explicitly don't do anything beyond that to favor YC or YC companies on HN, though we don't draw lines to exclude anything either, because YC-related people and content are an inseparable part of the community here.

I really need to add this to the FAQ though.

[TechBro8615]

IIRC it's also true that YC founders see each other's names in a special color.

[mattbee]

What alterations could HN make to the front page weighting algorithm that tries to spot and penalise voting rings?

e.g. if you're someone who routinely upvotes posts within minutes, maybe your vote could count for less than an account that only dips in to the new page occasionally?

Or maybe your vote gets penalised if it's your only upvote in a 24 hour period?

Or maybe HN keeps track of who you upvote with, and your vote gets penalised the more you upvote with the same people?

idk, it sounds like a fun project for someone if HN wanted a more organic front page.

[dang]

Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years:

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

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

I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

[mattbee]

Thanks, I didn't know at all.

I can see you didn't want to talk about this, esp with the tedious conspiracists. But I'm glad you did, and appreciate your work in keeping HN interesting & fair.

It surprised me because 1) I achieved a moderate position on the front page a few years back "asking a few friends" to upvote something about my former company, but mainly 2) there's no warning to new post submitters as to the values, integrity etc. of the site, to warn people off trying to game it, which I'd expect when you'd put that much work in.

I know there's a minimalist / in-the-know aesthetic to HN but I've been here 10 years, started & sold a tech business, and still didn't know the rules, the moderation patterns etc, other than "by example" (but then who'd want a whole meta.hn forum, gulp).

[dang]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html are linked in the footer of every page, and both contain information about this.

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share a link to the post you mentioned that got on the front page? I'd like to see whether our software missed it, and why. You can provide it here or send it to [e-mail] if you'd prefer a private conversation.

Sometimes the software catches voting rings and we turn the penalty off because the article seems likely to interest the community. It's not perfect, though, and knowing about cases that it missed can be very helpful, since independent verification is usually not available!

[ta999999171]

"Guidelines" is the first link in the footer.

[BooneJS]

Well, and whenever Google sunsets a product.

[TechBro8615]

This is definitely true and not just about Tailscale.

[blackandblue]

noticed the same here.

the question is, how do we get other interesting posts and products to HN front page?

[dclusin]

If I google for "buy hacker news upvotes" I see someone selling them for $2. You don't need a network for it. If you spend time on your content marketing and you buy upvotes you'll get bumped to the front page and stay there. Tinfoil hat not necessary.

When the HN plays favoritism in the vein of shilling for Y Combinator portfolio companies they make it fairly obvious to anybody paying attention. The portfolio company hiring posts are an example. Post to job descriptions and commenting disabled.

[dang]

Those spammers are ripping off their own customers. What actually happens when people use that service is that they get their sites and accounts banned. I can't claim this in all cases, because I don't have a list of all their customers, but we've done it dozens of times and we have much independent verification in the form of user confessions and mea culpas. (We're softies when it comes to forgiving people, by the way, as long as they tell the truth.)

As I said recently, it's a cat and mouse game and we eat a lot of mice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916935

You guys should realize how much work we put into defending this site against manipulation. Especially if you ever find yourself wondering why there isn't much new feature development on HN.

[ta999999171]

Two things:

Please stick to this, new features aren't necessary! (You've heard this 10,000x before, but, reinforcing for posterity.

...could you un-shadowban me/whatever the state of my account is right now?

[dang]

We banned you as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22602849.

Happy to unban you if you give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. It's best to email [e-mail] about that.

[cbg0]

Having your friends upvote your posts on HN doesn't mean HN "favors" you.

[toomuchtodo]

> Can I ask people to upvote my submission? [1]

> No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. HN's software penalizes submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.

"A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted." [2]

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7543910

[eloff]

Yep, too bad not everyone follows the rules. It's the same with everything that can be gamed from search results to taxes.

[armaxt]

Even if it is only as innocent as having your friends mass upvoting every thread of yours, then this is an outright exploitation of HN rules. Again never happened that a company, especially a company that was started a few months ago and hardly known by anybody, gets to the frontpage with a 100% hit rate for more than 10 times in less than 3 months.

[dang]

Sure, that's very much against HN's rules. Also against HN's rules is posting accusations about these things without evidence. I've looked extensively into these cases, mainly because you've drummed up such a fuss about them with your various accounts. I found zero evidence of abuse. All the data indicates that these threads have been upvoted by serious, longstanding HN community members are just genuinely interested in the topic—probably because of the lineage of the founders, who are well known to this community and whose work many people like to follow.

You've now crossed way beyond the point of trolling, including barraging us with hostile emails, and it's time to drop it and move on.

[armaxt]

There is no accusation, you're just playing with words to deflect the situation and make it on me instead on the real issue here which is about a company that had more frontpage posts of free positive publicity than most FAANG companies in the last month with a staggering 100% hit rate.

[ta999999171]

As someone who has spent years upon years fighting with and against corrupt subreddit mods+astroturfing users on reddit:

HN can't do much about upvotes coming from friends if they're sufficiently distributed/no patterns to find.

Also, please consider: their posts are just good/stimulate great discussion across multiple sectors of tech (networking meshing applies to ALMOST EVERYONE!).