[version_five]

If you troll around in "New" for long enough you'll see threads where some version of this happens - though it's impossible to tell of they are bought upvotes, fake accounts made by the poster, or just friends that were asked to come and post. You'll see some mediocre SaaS thing that's posted here and on Product hunt and a bunch of comments from new users like "Wow so exciting, great job!". They usually get flagged quickly. I have never seen something that I felt was suspect that didn't fall into the really blatant category, so either these guys are really good, or they suck.

It would be fun to use chatgpt to make some throwaway SaaS mvp and then get these guys to promote it to see what the experience is like (and then write it up for HN).

[pleaselegalize]

I worked for a YC company called Anima App [1] that begged us through multiple @here pings to "boost" their posts on HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc... It never really worked on HN, the posts would just get buried, but it did kinda work on Reddit.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/anima-app

[svnt]

> 'Design to Code' Startup Anima Raises $2.5 Million in Seed Funding Dec 22, 2022

> Anima, a no-code tool that turns designs into code, raises $10 million Series A • TechCrunch Sep 01, 2021

> Seed

Strangest spelling of bridge I’ve ever seen

[cmcaleer]

I wish I could dismiss this with a snarky comment but it’s probably a worthwhile spend of ~2 minutes of everyone’s time in terms of return.

[version_five]

Iirc HN has some kind if detection for suspect upvotes - I could guess at algorithms for that, but for obvious reasons I doubt they would share specifically how they do it. It would be a fun data science project to look at the distributions of votes as they come in on stories.

[MicropenisMike]

Maybe this very thread is a SaaS ad with bought upvotes?

[arp242]

I used to work for a company that encouraged people to upvote their blog, even advising to wait a bit between opening the story and upvoting it (not that I suspect that matters much).

I'd be surprised if that's a unique case.

[johnea]

Isn't this how 90% of the www works?