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Play CTF: How would you exploit HN without being detected?
I'm curious because of a site called upvotes.club that was on the front page last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362).
YC said HN now gets 350,000 daily users, a lot of companies and people thought it was worth trying to spam/shill here several years ago so it must be worth trying much harder now. If upvotes.club had a reliable enough system to charge money for manipulating us others may have something that works or something in the works too.
The challenge:
1) stay invisible to dang and his team
2) stay unnoticed by all of us in the community
3) take something of value
4) be able to do it again, not necessarily often but on demand
What's your perfect heist?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- savethefuture 10y agoYou want me to explain how I would do it or just do it?
- benologist 10y agoExplain lol. My hope is it becomes harder to manipulate what links we're clicking any given day, or easier for dang etc to do their work.
- benologist 10y agoI would target email addresses, and would collect them by doing Show HN launches for content that is very easy to make, like curated and aggregated lists/links, newsletters that never get written, or services that are a thin layer over an API. Stuff that could be created within a day. When they were submitted I would wait until someone legitimately upvoted it. If it does get a real vote I would arrange an additional upvote from a HN user. At that point it will probably climb into the bottom 20 of the front page at least for a little while. I would use a different product, domain, submitter account and helpful upvoter each time.