
Hacker News Upvote: Add to Cart - collapse
http://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/
======
minimaxir
Upvote manipulation doesn't work on Hacker News because both the voting ring
detector is strong, and flagging is significantly more powerful and serves as
counteracting force to upvotes and serves as a check to submissions which
legit aren't good for the site. (both of these are in contrast with Product
Hunt, which turns a blind eye to voting manipulation and asking-friends-for-
upvotes-but-not-explicitly is often recommended as a promotion strategy on
that site: [https://medium.com/startup-grind/my-startup-launch-on-
produc...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/my-startup-launch-on-product-hunt-
was-disappointing-ff5c8e70860))

There is also a Hacker News "growth hacking" tactic of linking to /newest on
Facebook/Twitter instead of linking to the submission directly to avoid the
voting ring detector, which also doesn't work and is blatantly obvious:
[http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg)

~~~
austenallred
> Upvote manipulation doesn't work on Hacker News

I'm pretty sure that's unequivocally false. It's difficult enough to make it
work that it probably wouldn't be worth it, but I'm close to 100% sure I could
force something to the top if I wanted to. I don't particularly want to spend
the time automating accounts to make them "look natural" and I don't really
want to shell out the money to spend on IPs.

But I know for a fact the same thing is happening on Reddit with great success
every day. I could spell out how, but I don't think the HN mods would be too
keen on that. Any hacker should be able to figure it out, though.

Furthermore, if you produce something solid, all you'd really need is the
first <10 upvotes to get on the front page and let it catch on "organically."
I can promise you that is happening _all the time_ on HN.

I'm glad you keep your Twitter search running and keep calling people out that
blatantly ask for upvotes; the easiest way to kill spam is just to make it
difficult, but to say that manipulation doesn't work is just not true.

~~~
dang
> _I 'm pretty sure that's unequivocally false. [...] I could spell out how_

What makes you sure? If you know something we don't, we need to hear it—the
community relies on us to get this right. It's also personal: I've poured
countless hours into combating vote manipulation, and if you know my code
isn't working, you bet I want you to spell out how.

The upside of a public discussion outweighs the downside because (1) if you
tell us things we don't know, we can start investigating for them—it's what we
_don 't_ know that's worrisome; and (2) community members might respond with
valuable knowledge of their own. That's also why we haven't buried the OP
(which, in case users are wondering, we do know about and have lots of data
on).

~~~
austenallred
I'll email you.

For what it's worth, I don't think HN is in any immediate danger, nor do I
know of any active, large-scale vote manipulation happening currently. But to
say something like "vote manipulation on HN does not work" is a very bold
claim.

~~~
dang
Ok, I look forward to it. Edit: still waiting!

------
nickysielicki
I don't know how this website actually works, but if I wanted to make a
website like this, here's how I would do it.

The first thing on my mind would be avoiding detection. You can't spin up 5 DO
droplets and do your work from there-- every IP you use needs to be a
residential IP, and you need thousands of IP addresses. You could go to the
trouble of building your own botnet, but that's illegal and very difficult.

Luckily, there's an application called Hola that has convinced 20 million
people to willingly join their botnet, and you can buy yourself access to it
right here: [https://luminati.io](https://luminati.io) .

You'd think that would be the hardest part, but that service means it's the
easy part. Now I'd need to go learn PhantomJS and start creating accounts--
being sure to keep each account appearing at a particular IP address. The
hardest part is generating some credibility for these accounts. They should
always look like they're active-- so I'd be sure to have each account load far
more posts than they vote on, and I would upvote plenty of things that I
wasn't paid to upvote. Just to generate some randomness.

But that only gets me part of the way there-- these accounts would also need
to contribute. My first thought is that you could just scan for reposts in the
default subreddits and then repost popular top-level comments from the
previous post. I've actually seen this pointed out a few times on reddit. With
the amount of comments reddit gets, they probably don't have the resources to
detect duplicates.

Hackernews would be significantly harder-- I have no idea how you could
generate relevant comments without doing it by hand. That's my guess as to
what they're doing.

~~~
milankragujevic
You don't have to use Luminati, just RE hola and take out the keys and then
you can make unlimited accounts on there for free, like I used to do.

~~~
brilliantcode
wat do you mean by RE?

~~~
milankragujevic
Reverse engineer

------
KirinDave
If you're ever curious how the folks at reddit's r/the_donald maintain control
of the sub and why they so often disable moderation, services like this are
both how and why. Intermediates who sell upvotes are happy to run jobs for
both sides of a given debate.

This site is really expensive compared to some options I've seen sold.

I think my favorite part of all this is the billing screen. "Doesn't have to
be your real name."

~~~
Natsu
I don't use Reddit much, and I've never moderated a sub, so can you explain
more? Why would the mods need vote bots to control their own sub? Can't they
just moderate it?

~~~
hehheh
The bots (if there are any, I don't know) were designed to upvote the posts
enough that they'd flood the "all" page, which is an aggregation of many
subreddits.

~~~
Natsu
Didn't Reddit remove them from /r/all? I saw mods saying that they were among
the ones removed from /r/popular at least.

~~~
Klathmon
No, reddit made a special rule that their "stickied" posts wouldn't show up on
/r/all because the mods would sticky things to "slingshot" them to the front
page one at a time. And the users of the sub knew to upvote anything stickied.

They still will show up on /r/all of the post was never stickied.

------
peter422
A service like this could never work long term. HN admins could just spend $10
to upvote something, see what the behavior is like and then fix it.

~~~
Retr0spectrum
It sounds like they already do:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676960)

    
    
        "That's also why we haven't buried the OP (which, in case users are wondering, we do know about and have lots of data on)."

------
vinchuco
I was really hoping this store was selling stickers.

------
collapse
"Anchoring is a powerful psychological weapon":
[http://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-comment/](http://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-
news-comment/)

"Why so expensive compared to Reddit": [http://upvotes.club/buying-hacker-
news-growthhackers-upvotes...](http://upvotes.club/buying-hacker-news-
growthhackers-upvotes-expensive-compared-reddit/)

~~~
KirinDave
Reddit's easier to game because the user's downvotes & upvotes received are
much more powerful in their ranking there.

HN's also more expensive because there is less demand.

~~~
collapse
More expensive because there is less demand? Doesn't that usually go the other
way?

~~~
echelon
I imagine there's less supply as well.

Am I mistaken in thinking that they outsource to other people? (I'm having
trouble loading their website due to the load.)

Also, doesn't HN rank upvotes based on karma and account age? You can't
downvote until reaching 500(?) and having your account for a certain duration
of time.

~~~
projektir
> Also, doesn't HN rank upvotes based on karma and account age? You can't
> downvote until reaching 500(?) and having your account for a certain
> duration of time.

That sounds about right.

There seem to be some additional rules, too. For instance, there are certain
comments I don't see a downvote button for, and I have no clue why.

~~~
jsnell
Comments older than a day can't be downvoted.

------
Normal_gaussian
So are there any reasonable methods to combat this?

Is it a legal possibility (regardless of feasibility) to bring charges against
people for manipulation of this kind? (Does HN even have a User Agreement? I
can't remember if I had to do anything when I signed up)

~~~
supremesaboteur
Proof of work systems were originally designed to combat these types of
'spammy' behavior.

Give a challenge string and ask the user submitting an upvote to compute a
nonce that when added to the string would produce an hash with 10 leading
zeros. User submits the calculated nonce, the server computes the hash for
challenge string + nonce and the upvote is registered. This makes it
computationaly expensive for an upvote provider to submit hundreds of upvotes

~~~
teleclimber
Yeah but if you're using a botnet comprised of other people's cpus to submit
your upvotes, you already have a distributed computing environment for which
you pay zero dollars for computing time. So your cost is still zero.

~~~
Klathmon
And the response to that is to make the work have to be done by the human not
the machine (captchas)

But that gets user-hostile, so it's not the best idea.

------
ErikVandeWater
Do you have any evidence for your accusation?

~~~
dang
That doesn't sound like a good-faith question, which predictably leads to a
low-quality argument.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676504)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
kr7
Is there a good-faith way to ask that question?

I'm legitimately curious if KirinDave has evidence that r/t_d buys upvotes.

~~~
dang
Sure. Ask in the spirit of good conversation, not cross-examination, e.g. "how
did you come to that conclusion" or "why do you think that"—the way people put
things in a friendly in-person conversation. Make it clear that you're just
curious, and find some way to indicate that you assume good faith on the part
of the other.

In face-to-face conversation, most good-faith signals are sent with tone of
voice and physical expression. We don't have those channels in text so it's
necessary to encode them some other way.

~~~
lostsock
FYI I really appreciate the way you moderate dang, thanks for all the hard
work. You're clear, transparent, informative and paitent. It really makes all
the difference.

~~~
dang
Thank you!

