[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.