[miki123211]

There's a big problem with fighting against upvote sales, namely, if you fight too hard, buying upvotes might suddenly become more like buying downvotes, which is an useful service in itself.

If you're too harsh on content heavily promoted by voting rings and content with lots of low-quality comments, posting tons of low-quality comments and making a bad attempt at a voting ring becomes an useful strategy against your competition.

[tptacek]

HN is extremely harsh about synthetic upvoting, to the point where, if you have a social circle that looks at your writing before it goes up, you generally have to warn them not to upvote, lest the ring detector bury the story, and to date this notion of competitors burying stories with false flag ring votes just hasn't been a thing.