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HN is for sure used to gain a specific audience. It takes about 10-20 managed accounts to get a thing on the frontpage if you distribute the votes right. This

HN is for sure used to gain a specific audience. It takes about 10-20 managed accounts to get a thing on the frontpage if you distribute the votes right. This is why I in 2016 made the "no noise hacker news" chrome plugin. I could link directly but I think its bad practice - so search on your preferred search engine. From the description: This extension will filter stories from domains that - per november 2015 - had more than than 2500 submitted stories but less than 40% had more than 3 votes. Domains with usergenerated content (as github.com or youtube.com) are not included. Is this censoring? - No, this is a way of limiting domains with a high amount of noise.

dang 6y ago
I've personally spent countless hours working on HN's anti-abuse systems. From everything I've seen, what you're saying is quite false. It's also pernicious because it undermines people's faith in the community, so unless you can point to actual evidence, please don't post such insinuations. There's a site guideline about this, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Short version: people make these accusations up based on nothing more than patterns they imagine they see. If you do have any evidence, such as links to posts that you think "get on the frontpage" with "managed accounts", you should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. It's highly unlikely that the Economist or Bloomberg are trying to game HN. There are plenty of voting rings but the ones we've seen come from quite different places.

dang 6y ago

I've personally spent countless hours working on HN's anti-abuse systems. From everything I've seen, what you're saying is quite false. It's also pernicious because it undermines people's faith in the community, so unless you can point to actual evidence, please don't post such insinuations. There's a site guideline about this, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Short version: people make these accusations up based on nothing more than patterns they imagine they see. If you do have any evidence, such as links to posts that you think "get on the frontpage" with "managed accounts", you should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. It's highly unlikely that the Economist or Bloomberg are trying to game HN. There are plenty of voting rings but the ones we've seen come from quite different places.