4 ms·

Yep, and the admins should be able to see that. They should get one warning to stop or all accounts involved should be banned.

by ebbv 11y ago

RyanZAG 11y ago
Won't happen - there's little doubt that each person adding an upvote would be a real person. In order to police something like that you'd be effectively policing people's reasons for upvoting which is impossible.
- ebbv 11y ago
  They should be able to see that a bunch of immediate up votes to this submission were from Redmond, WA IP blocks. There's no need to guess as to motivation then.
  - daeken 11y ago
    They can also look for people going straight to a story and upvoting there, upvotes clustered around MS domains, and other things. All of which are currently in the voting ring detection code. HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).
minot 11y ago
Is it brigading if I post a permalink to a comment on slack?
sz4kerto 11y ago
It's slightly tricky because people usually upvote what they are interested in. Therefore if a big bunch of people are interested in Win10, then it is just completely normal if they upvote these topics. Similarly, basically every new Apple hardware ends up on the top of HN. Same applies to many other things -- secure messaging, depression/burnout related articles, all Tesla news, etc. It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people. I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.
- ebbv 11y ago
  The web developer community is well known to have a massive Apple bias. I'm not surprised by Apple stuff going to the top quickly, usually. But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly. I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    > web developer community What makes you say this is the only community on HN? I personally wouldn't say there's one specific community HN caters to beyond "technology people". There's all sorts of topics posted daily on here, and only a select few cater to web devs. Honestly, if it's something done by one of the big companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc), it'll most likely get on HN because there is no one particular focus.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Accusations of shilling without evidence are typically boring. This post is not an exception.
    - ebbv 11y ago
      You know what's even more boring? Someone replying with "This is boring." without contributing anything.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
Linking to an HN post internally and saying "please upvote this" is wrong; multiple people independently deciding they want to post or upvote the article, even multiple people from the same company, seems completely fine.

Yep, and the admins should be able to see that. They should get one warning to stop or all accounts involved should be banned.

by ebbv 11y ago

Yep, and the admins should be able to see that. They should get one warning to stop or all accounts involved should be banned.

RyanZAG 11y ago

Won't happen - there's little doubt that each person adding an upvote would be a real person. In order to police something like that you'd be effectively policing people's reasons for upvoting which is impossible.

ebbv 11y ago
They should be able to see that a bunch of immediate up votes to this submission were from Redmond, WA IP blocks. There's no need to guess as to motivation then.
- daeken 11y ago
  They can also look for people going straight to a story and upvoting there, upvotes clustered around MS domains, and other things. All of which are currently in the voting ring detection code. HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).

minot 11y ago

Is it brigading if I post a permalink to a comment on slack?

sz4kerto 11y ago

It's slightly tricky because people usually upvote what they are interested in. Therefore if a big bunch of people are interested in Win10, then it is just completely normal if they upvote these topics. Similarly, basically every new Apple hardware ends up on the top of HN. Same applies to many other things -- secure messaging, depression/burnout related articles, all Tesla news, etc. It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people. I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.

ebbv 11y ago
The web developer community is well known to have a massive Apple bias. I'm not surprised by Apple stuff going to the top quickly, usually. But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly. I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
  > web developer community What makes you say this is the only community on HN? I personally wouldn't say there's one specific community HN caters to beyond "technology people". There's all sorts of topics posted daily on here, and only a select few cater to web devs. Honestly, if it's something done by one of the big companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc), it'll most likely get on HN because there is no one particular focus.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Accusations of shilling without evidence are typically boring. This post is not an exception.
  - ebbv 11y ago
    You know what's even more boring? Someone replying with "This is boring." without contributing anything.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

Linking to an HN post internally and saying "please upvote this" is wrong; multiple people independently deciding they want to post or upvote the article, even multiple people from the same company, seems completely fine.