[benologist]

Ziff Davis had/has a half a dozen employee shill accounts at different times for extremetech.com, geek.com and pcmag.com.

This is a great illustration another HN user (DanBC) put together:

http://imgur.com/a/EfzHB

They have almost no natural submissions to HN.

[jschuur]

To be honest, those accounts in those pics don't convince me of anything. Most of the frequent posters from those domains post plenty of other links to other sites. They were created years apart. Two of them seem to post extremetech.com and/or geek.com exclusively, but posts are 5-10 days apart.

Isn't it a lot more likely that these are simply people who happen to read enough of those particular sites and post to HN to turn up on in a chart like this?

There's not enough data points to point to any kind of concerted effort by these sites over the span of years.

And even _if_ that were the case. Suppose someone affiliated with these sites is posting 1-2 links a week, that's hardly flooding the system. There's still the voting system, right? Good articles float towards the top. The new submissions page isn't jam packed with dozens of articles a day from these sites, is it?

[benologist]

ukdm and russellholly are this guy: https://plus.google.com/106631699076927387965

http://www.geek.com/users/rholly/

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly

mrsebastian is this guy:

http://www.extremetech.com/author/santhony

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian

maxko87 is an unknown who ran an autosubmitter for two sites one of which happened to be extremetech, till he got hellbanned:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=maxko87

adeelarshad82 is their social media marketing guy:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/adeelarshad82

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82

Then there's these guys who really love ziff davis properties:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=memoryfailure

And this guy who just likes them a lot of the time, he may just be a regular karma whore if that is a real thing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=evo_9

That accounts for almost all Ziff Davis submissions.

[mwilcox]

IIRC, IGN has previously been banned from reddit for malicious upvoting, so I guess they suit each other.