4 ms·

Guys, please don't do this. You submitted your startup. The submission got popular, and will now be discussed. Do we really need obvious sock puppet accounts cr

Guys, please don't do this. You submitted your startup. The submission got popular, and will now be discussed. Do we really need obvious sock puppet accounts created 10 minutes after the initial submission, commenting with enthusiasm and marketing speech?

IonWarp 15y ago
Antonio, don't be so quick to cry foul. I am one of classmetrics founder's brother, and run my own company out in Philadelphia area called LeanServer. If you need my papers, I will be more than happy to fax them to you. Best, Mike
- acangiano 15y ago
  Hi Mike, no need for papers, I'm not the Internet police. :-P It's just that your first comment came across as very suspicious, aside from not adding much to the discussion. Even having established that it's not a sock puppet account per se, it is still convention around here to disclose affiliation (anonymously praising your brother's company qualifies for this). Anyway, welcome to HN and best of luck with your startups to both of you.
- gjm11 15y ago
  > I am one of classmetrics founder's brother In which case, although you may not be a sockpuppet in the literal sense, what you did is frankly not much better. Sorry to be the bearer of disagreeable news, but that's how it is. It's not just that you'll get downvotes for this. I don't know about anyone else, but my opinion of the likely value of ClassMetrics went down when I saw your comment, and further down when it was confirmed that you were indeed basically spamming HN. That's probably not the outcome you were looking for. [EDITED to fix a typo.]
  - philwelch 15y ago
    On Wikipedia, the term for accounts like that is "meatpuppet".
- scott_s 15y ago
  Actually, with that knowledge, I find your initial comment dishonest. You have a personal interest in seeing the project succeed. That's different than someone with no personal interest in the project thinking it's cool.
Luyt 15y ago
Sadly, this is the only way to have your submission not drop off the 'new' page. The rate of submissions to HN is so high, that within the hour new submissions disappear from the first page. This is why people use PSUNs. A PSUN is a Personal Sockpuppet Upvoting Network, which is a bunch of Amazon EC instances masquerading as human HN users, programmed to immediately upvote submissions and/or comments made by the owner of the PSUN. They're getting more clever at it too, by posting vapid marketing one-liners to bump the comment count. Some PSUNs are really elaborate with precisely emulating a human traffic pattern, reading comments, up/downvoting here and there (triggered by textual analysis of comments), and therefore impossible to distinguish from a real human user, even with social graph analysis. Like Windows can't do with a Anti-Virus program, HNers who don't want to see every submission they make slide into oblivion, are required to deploy a PSUN.

IonWarp 15y ago

Antonio, don't be so quick to cry foul. I am one of classmetrics founder's brother, and run my own company out in Philadelphia area called LeanServer. If you need my papers, I will be more than happy to fax them to you. Best, Mike

acangiano 15y ago
Hi Mike, no need for papers, I'm not the Internet police. :-P It's just that your first comment came across as very suspicious, aside from not adding much to the discussion. Even having established that it's not a sock puppet account per se, it is still convention around here to disclose affiliation (anonymously praising your brother's company qualifies for this). Anyway, welcome to HN and best of luck with your startups to both of you.
gjm11 15y ago
> I am one of classmetrics founder's brother In which case, although you may not be a sockpuppet in the literal sense, what you did is frankly not much better. Sorry to be the bearer of disagreeable news, but that's how it is. It's not just that you'll get downvotes for this. I don't know about anyone else, but my opinion of the likely value of ClassMetrics went down when I saw your comment, and further down when it was confirmed that you were indeed basically spamming HN. That's probably not the outcome you were looking for. [EDITED to fix a typo.]
- philwelch 15y ago
  On Wikipedia, the term for accounts like that is "meatpuppet".
scott_s 15y ago
Actually, with that knowledge, I find your initial comment dishonest. You have a personal interest in seeing the project succeed. That's different than someone with no personal interest in the project thinking it's cool.

Luyt 15y ago

Sadly, this is the only way to have your submission not drop off the 'new' page. The rate of submissions to HN is so high, that within the hour new submissions disappear from the first page. This is why people use PSUNs. A PSUN is a Personal Sockpuppet Upvoting Network, which is a bunch of Amazon EC instances masquerading as human HN users, programmed to immediately upvote submissions and/or comments made by the owner of the PSUN. They're getting more clever at it too, by posting vapid marketing one-liners to bump the comment count. Some PSUNs are really elaborate with precisely emulating a human traffic pattern, reading comments, up/downvoting here and there (triggered by textual analysis of comments), and therefore impossible to distinguish from a real human user, even with social graph analysis. Like Windows can't do with a Anti-Virus program, HNers who don't want to see every submission they make slide into oblivion, are required to deploy a PSUN.