Site claims to sell upvotes on Hacker News

If you troll around in &quot;New&quot; for long enough you&#x27;ll see threads where some version of this happens - though it&#x27;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&#x27;ll see some mediocre SaaS thing that&#x27;s posted here and on Product hunt and a bunch of comments from new users like &quot;Wow so exciting, great job!&quot;. They usually get flagged quickly. I have never seen something that I felt was suspect that didn&#x27;t fall into the really blatant category, so either these guys are really good, or they suck.<p>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).

Site admins should &quot;buy upvotes&quot; a few times, at different hours of the day, and aggressively ban every account that&#x27;s a repeat offender.<p>But, really, upvotes are always easily exploitable and often lead to a sort of herd mentality among commenters. This is why Reddit is the definition of &quot;echo chamber.&quot; HN is much better, but it would still be improved if upvotes and downvotes were done away with entirely.

Who cares, dang does a great job moderating the site and let me tell you but being on the HN frontpage might get you traffic but will also get you the most savagely honest feedback you can ask for, so whatever. If they bought the upvotes they will either get ignorance or a thread asking what bull shit is this and why is on the homepage or smt like that

An evergreen topic here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=author%3Adang%20buy%20upvotes&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a><p>If this worked reliably at these prices, it would be trivial to burn the accounts behind it: you&#x27;d just buy upvotes (cheaply, it turns out!) for a marginal story and watch who votes for it. It&#x27;s most probably a scam, feeding on people who themselves hope to scam the site.

It&#x27;s interesting that the intellectual capacity here at HN acts as a &quot;horseshit detector&quot; pretty much subconsciously. This service does seem to offer <i>a lot</i> of upvotes (50 &amp; 100), which one could argue can be bought to boost a story that has 100 organic upvotes already. But maybe dang has a built-in upvote spike monitor for this.<p>As for &#x2F;new - it&#x27;s pretty hard to get by that gate if you&#x27;re making a blatant attempt of trying to get on the front page. And I think a lot of HN users would easily recall a time they flagged something on &#x2F;new because it&#x27;s clearly spam even if it doesn&#x27;t look like it at first glance.<p>Now, the irony here would be if this is actually a gamed submission itself and the provider is showing that they can get your story on the front page regardless.

You can buy literally any platforms equivalent of upvotes. What&#x27;s special about this?<p>Any sufficiently large site will have to deal with bad actors and bots, HN is no different. HN has not been a small site for 3-4 years now.

This would be great if it was itself a scam - some world-worsening grifter plunks down $40-75, the site says &quot;thanks!&quot; then does nothing.

I&#x27;m going to use this as an excuse to springboard off on a tangent I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about.<p>I think my social media story might be pretty common. Early on, all my social graphs across various platforms were well managed mappings of my real life friends. Today, all my social graphs are a mess. Platforms seem to push to make it easier to discover and find new friends. I want the opposite of this.<p>I want to have to go through a series of steps in real life in order to add someone to my contact list. I want to classify this friend in some way that acknowledges what the level of trust is. Is this person a casual acquaintance or a trusted family member?<p>When content is &quot;shared&quot; and I&#x27;m receiving it in my news feed, I don&#x27;t just want to see how many &quot;likes&quot; it has. I want to heuristics on how my personal network responded to that piece of content. And, of course, I want to own that data and I want my hardware to crunch the data. So this could be built in a decentralized way.<p>This paradigm is far less susceptible to Sybil attacks, such as paid upvotes on a sites like Hacker News. It would isolate us, in a way, from the zeitgeist. But it would connect us more closely with our real world social network.

For me, this loops back to the age-old question &quot;Is there honor among thieves?&quot;.<p>Or, to put it in another way, whose to say that they deliver at all?<p>The site appears barely functional, their own social media accounts have laughably small follower&#x2F;subscriber numbers considering what they claim to offer and unless I am mistaken, there appears to be an active effort, beyond the often cited meassure that ensures voting on directly linked posts does not affect the vote count[0], to keep everything honest.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;hacker-news-undocumented&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md#anti-voting-manipulation">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;minimaxir&#x2F;hacker-news-undocumented&#x2F;blob&#x2F;m...</a>

I&#x27;m also selling upvotes.<p>I pay one upvote per article worth seeing more of. And one upvote for good comments.

Is there a way to identify this behaviour? I am all for a platform which leans in on authentic discovery. ProductHunt and Reddit have long since been lost causes. HN did seem like holding out.<p>Being asked to defend your work in public and why it&#x27;s worth being upvoted or talked about is something that folks building should have to go through.

Quick reminder: upvotes are not a proxy for quality.<p>People vote based on how <i>they feel</i> about a product not on the merit of the product itself. In my experience, votes are about 90% subjective, 10% objective. You will not find someone upvoting something they dislike just because they believe it&#x27;s objectively true, likewise you will not find someone downvoting something they like just because they believe it&#x27;s objectively false. Votes have very little to do with the thing being voted on and very much to do with the way the voter feels when voting. It&#x27;s much easier to act on instinct than logic. There is a nontrivial number of people in this world that never realize the difference between their perception of reality and reality itself.<p>The most popular things are often the simplest or easiest to digest, not necessarily the best for the given purpose. Popularity is not a proxy for quality.

I paid for the upvotes but this is all I got.

For a long time, I noticed that, if I made a comment about Windows LTSC&#x2F;LTSB, it would get downvoted heavily, and that there was a timing pattern to it.<p>Also, there&#x27;s a certain set of topics where I can watch the tally go, very predictably -- up, then it gets <i>smashed</i>, and then finally there&#x27;s some Johnny Come Latelies who vote up again.<p>Personally, agreement is easy and congruent (&quot;This is correct&quot;); disagreement is quite different (&quot;This is incorrect, and here&#x27;s why ...&quot;). I think you ought to be able to &quot;agree&quot; with an upvote, but disagreement? That&#x27;s when words are more useful. Downvotes are too easily brigaded and provide nothing in the way of discussion.

What&#x27;s actually more accurate is to say that there&#x27;s a site out there that claims that they will sell you upvotes on Hacker News. Whether that actually happens, where, and how is unsubstantiated (sorry dang). I edited the title to reflect that

Is buying upvotes really effective in the long run? It might give you some short-term gains sure, but it could even backfire as people start to notice that your posts are getting artificially high ratings and lose trust in your content.<p>Plus, if you&#x27;re trying to build a genuine community around your product or idea, you need their honest feedback and support to truly understand what they want and how to improve. So, I&#x27;d say that buying upvotes is not a sustainable strategy and could actually harm your chances of success on the road to PMF.

There&#x27;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.<p>If you&#x27;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.

I ve had a few things hit the homepage here over the years. Did not mean much beyond the good link juice. Did it work out differently for people here?

So all the HN team have to do is to spend the money a few times and see which users always upvote the &#x27;boosted&#x27; posts?

YC could offer this as a paid service.<p>For $100 million, you can boost a post with fake upvotes.<p>(Hey, it could be the big break that turns into a $1B startup. And the cost to provide this service is high, since YC thrives on reputation, which this erodes.)<p>Now that it has a price tag, sue others for theft of service.

If your service has any form of gamification, not matter how primitive - you can buy &quot;cheats&quot; for it.

that&#x27;s not surprising to me. the show HN feature might bring a product out of obscurity if it hits the front page, so there&#x27;s certainly an incentive.

&gt; Hacker News consists primarily of these two social news websites, computer science, and entrepreneurship.<p>Hmm. It&#x27;s not obvious they&#x27;ve actually visited.

Bah, site is not loading for me. I am curious, what does an upvote cost? Is there time of day&#x2F;week pricing? Stories vs comments?

I have a yearning to spend the money and use it to boost a post called &quot;I bought this to the top of HN&quot;.

Heh, it is surprisingly expensive. Does it mean HN ecosystem is not that easy to break compared to other sites?

Rule of thumb: If it&#x27;s cross-posted on ProductHunt the same day it&#x27;s most likely spam.

The big centralized aggregators seem to be getting eaten by their own success. The way forward is likely the fediverse. Lemmy has gained a lot of traction since the reddit blackout and seems like a good alternative. Could we get enough people to move from HN?

So... $375 for 500 karma and permission to downvote?<p>Why am I not surprised?

No thanks. I would much rather people downvote me when they disagree. If all I get is upvotes then what purpose would it serve to be here? That would imply we all think alike which would be silly and dangerous.

It appears the last bastion of free discourse is no longer free. Maybe I’ve been disillusioned all this time but, I’ve always felt HN to be of quality.

Color me surprised

Very cool article! Very interesting. Much recommended. A+.

So the comments can&#x27;t be trusted much anymore...

Is this real?

Did anyone think this wasn&#x27;t happening?

You also see it with certain companies that have a very active presence on HN. Any negative comment is downvoted aggressively. Downvoting on HN is rather uncommon, people tend to tell you why they disagree with you rather than vote you down. When it happens with some of these companies you never see that.

Unsurprising. Now this explains how the Rust posts were getting upvoted to the top so quickly.<p>Case closed.