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How do you determine that it's the site's owner? If I buy 1000 upvotes for mycompetitor.com, will you boot them? Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google
by luckylion 6y ago
How do you determine that it's the site's owner? If I buy 1000 upvotes for mycompetitor.com, will you boot them?
Attribution is a terribly hard problem, Google has the same issue with paid links, and handles with the Disavow Links tool, but that's a hack, not a solution, as it essentially means you have to buy services that get you and up to date list of links to your page so you can disavow them before Google hands out penalties.
- dang 6y agoFor sure it's a hard problem, but in this context on HN, it doesn't come up in many cases. When it does, how we handle it is by being flexible and personally available about unbanning. That's a luxury afforded by smallness. In the more common case, though, it's clear enough who's doing it to take action. And you'd be surprised how often we get explicit confirmation of what happened. Sometimes a site owner will even passionately profess innocence and then sheepishly come back later with "I'm so sorry, you were right, it turns out my marketing-person/friend/teammate did it."