Either the author is misunderstanding things or I am.
I was under the impression that HN had a relatively liberal policy on scrapers, allowing hobbyists to scrape the content and present it in alternative UIs, such as https://hckrnews.com or http://hn.elijames.org
That doesn't seem analogous to PBNs, where the value they add is not a better browsing interface but just some extra link juice.
How many HN clones using X new JS framework XYZ or UI reskins are out there in the wild using the Firebase API? It feels like you see one on the front page at least once a week. And that is what almost all of these sites shown in the screenshots of the article are, not some kind of grey/black hat SEO optimization ring.
Interesting! Do you have any clue on why these websites are being made? Reddit also has many aggregators, but some of them are literal blogger websites.
HN is a relatively simple, well understood web site, and there is an easy-to-use API that one can get access to without much ceremony. It's almost as common a "getting started" type project for a new front-end framework as creating yet another todo list app.
I've assigned it as a take-home project for job candidates before.
You are jumping to conclusions. Because the HN UI is not everyone's cup of tea, there are a lot of people that have reworked the UI for mobile, etc. Also, there isn't or wasn't an HN API, so scraping was the only option. Finally, there's a lot of people who take on the exercise for fun, so you get "HN in VueJS" which aren't nefarious, just exercises.
Look at your results, why would you think "React HN clone" on github.io was something other than just a personal fun project.
The good thing is that it's currently impossible to game things I think. My blog is mentioned in this article. I post all of my articles on HN and so far I haven't noticed any pattern that would help me predict which ones will do well. The algorithm seems pretty robust.
I've seen some people asking for boosts on facebook, and my circle isn't even that tech heavy. So people are gaming it, but it's hard to say how effective they are.
I thought the value of backlinks was dependent on the number of backlinks the backlink has, so if all the backlinks are random scrapers with little traffic, why should it boost seo?
I was under the impression that HN had a relatively liberal policy on scrapers, allowing hobbyists to scrape the content and present it in alternative UIs, such as https://hckrnews.com or http://hn.elijames.org
That doesn't seem analogous to PBNs, where the value they add is not a better browsing interface but just some extra link juice.