Serious question: Is here some voting ring upvoting or HN being hacked? Reading the weird submission and this thread full of confused users, I am surprised this got on #1 and even stays there.
It'll probably slide down quickly. It was only posted 30 mins ago and there are ~130 upvotes and ~40 comments. That shows HN lots of interaction and is surprisingly high for a post only 30 mins old.
The artificial inflation is probably real, but not malicious. For example, say 1 in 500 readers of a post normally leave a comment on HN. That would be the baseline that HN's algorithm compares stuff too.
This post has an extremely intriguing title, causing lots of people to click it. Then as people click it, no one understands it, so then they all come to leave a comment asking what the hell this product/service (i still don't get it myself) is. This confusion is actually helping the post on HN because so many people are confused that let's say 1 in 100 people leave comments instead of 1 in 500 which is the norm. This causes the HN algorithm to assume this post is causing discussion and must be particularly interesting to users because it has 5X the interaction of a normal post.
So the confusion is real, and I doubt it will hold for too long, but since the post is so new and has very high genuine interaction (comments of confusion is still interaction) points, the HN algorithm will rank it highly.
I feel the same way. These guys are in every thread about editors posting a link to their site. They posted about it so often, I wish I had a filter for it by now. I think HN has to step up their adblock game.
Also, and serious answer. I would NEVER participate in anything like a voting ring and have been very vocal about paid advertising in the RSS community in the past.
Lost a very very high paying customer to Datastreamer who was using RSS content to create google spam.
We never sold to them as they violated our ToS out of the gate.
