[skilled]

It's interesting that the intellectual capacity here at HN acts as a "horseshit detector" pretty much subconsciously. This service does seem to offer a lot of upvotes (50 & 100), which one could argue can be bought to boost a story that has 100 organic upvotes already. But maybe dang has a built-in upvote spike monitor for this.

As for /new - it's pretty hard to get by that gate if you're making a blatant attempt of trying to get on the front page. And I think a lot of HN users would easily recall a time they flagged something on /new because it's clearly spam even if it doesn't look like it at first glance.

Now, the irony here would be if this is actually a gamed submission itself and the provider is showing that they can get your story on the front page regardless.

[zeven7]

It would be interesting to hear more about how HN combats this, though I understand there probably needs to be some secrecy around it as giving away all of the details may make it easier for bad actors to know how to avoid detection.

[skilled]

I don't keep track of this myself but I think dang specifically has said there are some systems in place to combat things like someone launching a product and then blasting it on Slack, Discord, etc. and getting everyone to upvote it.