[RyanZAG]

Internal MS voting circle.

Edit: Not to say they're necessarily doing it on purpose or for marketing: Microsofties would receive these urls internally, and if only 20 or so of them immediately submitted them to HN, it would go to the top of the frontage.

Although personally and knowing the extremes Microsoft goes to with marketing, I'd also not doubt if said Microsofties were 'informally encouraged' to share such links on social media as much as possible.

[jfuhrman]

>Microsofties would receive these urls internally, and if only 20 or so of them immediately submitted them to HN, it would go to the top of the frontage.

>Although personally and knowing the extremes Microsoft goes to with marketing, I'd also not doubt if said Microsofties were 'informally encouraged' to share such links on social media as much as possible.

The blog was posted publicly around 6 hours ago, this post was made less than one hour ago.

[ebbv]

Yep, and the admins should be able to see that. They should get one warning to stop or all accounts involved should be banned.

[sz4kerto]

It's slightly tricky because people usually upvote what they are interested in. Therefore if a big bunch of people are interested in Win10, then it is just completely normal if they upvote these topics. Similarly, basically every new Apple hardware ends up on the top of HN. Same applies to many other things -- secure messaging, depression/burnout related articles, all Tesla news, etc.

It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people.

I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.

[ebbv]

The web developer community is well known to have a massive Apple bias. I'm not surprised by Apple stuff going to the top quickly, usually.

But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly.

I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.

[mynameisvlad]

> web developer community

What makes you say this is the only community on HN? I personally wouldn't say there's one specific community HN caters to beyond "technology people". There's all sorts of topics posted daily on here, and only a select few cater to web devs. Honestly, if it's something done by one of the big companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc), it'll most likely get on HN because there is no one particular focus.

[oldmanjay]

Accusations of shilling without evidence are typically boring. This post is not an exception.

[ebbv]

You know what's even more boring? Someone replying with "This is boring." without contributing anything.

[RyanZAG]

Won't happen - there's little doubt that each person adding an upvote would be a real person. In order to police something like that you'd be effectively policing people's reasons for upvoting which is impossible.

[ebbv]

They should be able to see that a bunch of immediate up votes to this submission were from Redmond, WA IP blocks. There's no need to guess as to motivation then.

[daeken]

They can also look for people going straight to a story and upvoting there, upvotes clustered around MS domains, and other things. All of which are currently in the voting ring detection code.

HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).

[JoshTriplett]

Linking to an HN post internally and saying "please upvote this" is wrong; multiple people independently deciding they want to post or upvote the article, even multiple people from the same company, seems completely fine.

[minot]

Is it brigading if I post a permalink to a comment on slack?

[_RPM]

Your theory probably explains why my comment got down-voted so much. Within 2 seconds of positing it had 3 upvotes now look at it.

[Avalaxy]

I downvoted it as well, for the simple reason that you post has _nothing_ to do with this article, and because the whole thing about click/key logging is nonsense (at least in the RTM, yes I know they're gathering statistics for the previews, and they have been very open and honest about that).

[maccard]

No, your comment was down voted because it doesn't add anything to the discussion, other than ranting about Microsoft and closed source. Do you trust not only the Linux kernel, but the people who developed your sister of choice, along with the source you downloaded it from? Did you verify that the version you downloaded and installed was the same as the version you have source access to? Did you do the same thing for all of the third party software such as your web browser, video drivers, etc. did you do the same for your mobile phone?

Also, is everything on your machine open source? Are you using open drivers, firmware, boot loaders, BIOS?

Assuming you've done all of the above, how many people do you know of that you trust to read the code and verify the above is true for them? How many people do you know that have vetted the source code of the distro you're using. Just because someone can, doesn't mean someone has, especially if everyone else thinks someone else will verify it for them.

[daeken]

Within two seconds? I'm calling BS on that. But I downvoted it as soon as I saw it. It's nonsensical FUD and added nothing to the conversation.

[_RPM]

I refreshed the page as soon as I posted it and it had +3

[mynameisvlad]

So the two people who agree with you upvoted early, and now the people who disagree are downvoting. It's crazy how opinions work.