alt Hacker NewsI am just gonna link the stats of this hackernews post[0] and let public decide the rest because for context, this is same company which was mentioned in a blow-up post 12 days ago which had gotten 600 upvotes and they didn't respond back then[1] (I have found it hard for posts to have such a 2x factor within minutes of posting, that's just my personal observation. Usually one gets it after an hour or two or three.)
I was curious so I did some more research within the company to find more shady stuff going on like intentionally buying new domains a month prior to send that spam to not have the mail reputation of their website down. You can read my comment here[2]
Just to be on the safe side here, @dang (yes pinging doesn't work but still), can you give us some average stats of who are the people who upvoted this and an internal investigation if botting was done. I can be wrong about it and I don't ever mean to harm any company but I can't in good faith understand this. Some stats
Some stats I would want are: Average Karma/Words written/Date of the accounts who upvoted this post. I'd also like to know what the conclusion of internal investigation (might be) if one takes place.
[There is a bit of conflicts of interest with this being a YC product but I think that I trust hackernews moderator and dang to do what's right yeah]
I am just skeptical, that's all, and this is my opinion. I just want to provide some historical context into this company and I hope that I am not extrapolating too much.
It's just really strange to me, that's all.
[0]: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=47326101 (see the expected upvotes vs real upvotes and the context of this app and negative reception and everything combined)
[1]: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163885
The upvotes on the current post are fine - the reason you saw the submission rise in rank is that startup launch posts by YC startups get special placement on the front page (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Not every such post does, but some do.
In other words, your perception wasn't wrong, but the interpretation was off. I've put "Launch HN" and "YC W26" back in the title to make that clearer - I edited them out earlier, which was my mistake.
As for the booster comments, those are pretty common on launch threads and often pretty innocent - most people who aren't active HN users have no idea that it's against the rules. We do our best to communicate about that, but it's not a cardinal sin—there are far worse offenses.