[bearjaws]

You can buy literally any platforms equivalent of upvotes. What's special about this?

Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.

[itunpredictable]

Nothing special, just was interesting to see. I wonder who the clientele is...

[tough]

Startup VC funded founders who have no clue about community, marketing, or PR, and thus externalise their goals to dubious companies willing to make whatever necessary to reach the goal.

The real hack is knowing the audience hn is comprised of, and creating great content for that audience. There's several great startups doing just that and very finely so too in HN

[geraldwhen]

Votes and fake engagement keeps your post on front page longer, which spurs more organic interaction.

This has been marketing 101 for at least a decade. Reddit, hacker news, any site with user content is bought and paid for.

[Grimburger]

A warning for people that talking about and linking the reddit votes/user markets while on reddit leads to an automatic sitewide ban.

I lost 10 year old account by offhandedly mentioning it existed in a thread like this criticising the behaviour.

It's weird they don't want to talk about it but I do understand not linking it. There's mod accounts to some very big national subs up for sale.

[tough]

Would you mind linking it here? HN seems like one of the bastions of free speech, I don't frequent reddit much but I wonder what shenanigans are up there, have seen some wild shit with even companies -stealing- subreddits from the creators lmao