[jklio]

Amusingly I am still green and agree with you that it is sketchy. A wave of new accounts for a company that specializes in inserting product placement into what people consider to be normal communication... And it's one thing to make an account to ask a question about a service - that's plausible - it's quite another to make an account to say "nice site!". Mods should investigate.

[kmfrk]

What really bothers me is that it seems to have worked in pushing the link to the front page of Hacker News.

After copious experiences with trigger happy algorithms flagging me as a false-positive spammer, I am surprised that something as blatantly conspicuous as this managed to get so far - regardless of who orchestrated it.

[dangrossman]

It didn't last very long there. Once the sockpuppetry became evident, it was likely flagged by a few people, and is now nowhere to be found among the top 100 stories, whereas a highly voted front page story typically stays for 10+ hours. The user moderation system works.

[jklio]

It's especially interesting as my capacity to vote seemed to only kicked in today after a week of being green. The last week my votes seemed to go through but then the arrow reappeared on a later page load and the pages weren't in my saved stories. So it has to have made it to the front page without the help of the current commenting socks, but with votes from elsewhere (or even genuine users I suppose, but the socks put a big question mark over that).