| It seems that this post may have been artificially upvoted by the author of this post. The oldest comments are all at the bottom and are short, trivial and grayed out comments. One of those comments appears to be legit and another appears to be from a fellow Brazilian entrepreneur. However the rest are suspect. The submitter/author of the post created his account 23 days ago. The following accounts were all created 22 and 23 days ago and have only commented on everwrite related posts. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mateusbicalho
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bgrossi
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucasarruda These accounts were created shortly after this was submitted and have only posted on this submission with the same short, positive comments. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpresende
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eusouomatt These all do have real name formats, so perhaps these are all employees of everwrite and were asked to come vote this up? I'm not sure what the official rules are here, but it certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth to send five associates here to vote this up and comment on the article in the early stages of the post, where five upvotes likely makes a large difference. And if it's straight up sock puppeting, it's simply unacceptable. EDIT: I take back that one of the early comments seems legit, this account http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lucianot is also associated with everwrite in some way. http://twitter.com/#!/lucianot/status/114152173767639042 I hate to be the one who makes the drama, but the whole thing seems disingenuous to make all these fluff comments without disclosure and is not beneficial for the community. Imagine if a company with 2000 employees sent an army this way! |
But don't accuse people of "sock puppeting" unless you have all the facts. Sock puppeting implies creating faking accounts, which is not the case and this should be easy for the admins to verify. Also, stating that they used employees to upvote is pathetic, because they have no employees!
The truth is much simpler: OP wrote a blog post about his experience, posted it on HN and shared the link with his network of friends/acquaintances (myself included). I enjoyed the post, upvoted and wrote a positive comment. Period.
What is wrong with that?? I am a real user (746 days old account) and legitimately thought the post was well written and very helpful for other starting entrepreneurs. It seems many other people also found this to be the case, as there were several links to the post in the local media, not to mention dozens of comments on the original blog. (Sock puppets too??)
In the future, I will disclose even a remote relation to an OP when I write a comment, just to be safe. But, please, don't go around making accusations based on loose facts and general suspicions. Witch-hunting is just as harmful to HN.