What you'll probably find if you keep searching the comments here is that many people will say that I emailed or called them personally after they commented on my work here.
I'm engaged in this community and that's easier and more effective than setting up dummy accounts.
I have had the same suspicion for quite a while and am surprised no one has looked into this. Glad to hear someone else thinks it's not just the little voices in my head.
AndrewWarner does link directly to HN and ask for votes, so it's quite likely that people register specifically to upvote/comment for his submissions.
I would like to see him comment on the ruby35 account, it is quite suspicious: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ruby35
I think that if you have no evidence to substantiate these accusations, then you should keep them to yourself.
I mean, he can easily just be one of the many happy frequent visitors of Mixergy? Andrew does post links to here quite often from the Mixergy site, and they can easily just follow that link.
Though, I must admit as a guy who loves the Mixergy interviews, who is currently saving up for his own startup; I am currently forgoing a cell phone, car, insurance and any other unnecessary expenses, and I cannot validate a $25-100/mo charge for this content. Its valuable, but not that valuable to me. I think he forgot about his bootstrapped followers who can't watch his interviews live and often catch them after the fact.
Though in hindsight, this just may increase the viewership of his live shows - which is an increase in viewer participation in the interview process. Perhaps that is his goal?
It's not about the live shows so much as it is about getting people to watch my interviews the day or week that post them.
What I'm finding is that if I don't create urgency around watching the interviews the day I watch them, people will consider them old and ignore them.
[1] I have no evidence that underover is male; I'm merely using the masculine pronouns by default.
Your assertion that Andrew created these new accounts is sophomoric and pathetic.
On the one hand creating an account to protect your anonymity when you make a potentially inflammatory accusation about the behavior of a prominent member of the community.
And on the other, creating an account to make it appear that you have more support on the forum than you actually have.
I find the latter to be a serious problem whereas the former seems reasonable and ethical.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130231
I have long suspected that Andrew has been using fake accounts or paying people to put a positive spin on his threads. The above comment was made by a brand new a account and follows a trend of other fishy comments.