Sure there is. The way has been outlined by `beeboop' and `killwhitey' in this thread, and subsequently by myself. The question have not been answered: if the concern is vote-brigading then the correct result can be determined by looking at accounts that are more than 30 days old.

If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.

There are plenty of people with old accounts who would not have voted for pinboard -- or, for that matter, even been aware that there was a poll happening -- if he had not actively solicited votes on twitter.

...I was about halfway into rebutting this when I realized, you know what, you're right.

I would not have cared at all about some contest on HN for a YC acceptance if it weren't for him mentioning it on Twitter. In fact, I would not have even known it was happening.

And now that I've seen the way both HN and YC has handled this throughout, including the attitude you've had towards his application since the beginning, I wish that he hadn't mentioned it on Twitter at all and my nearly 6-month-long streak of forgetting that HN exists had continued unbroken.

We could probably keep sparring over this, but the results are clearly not going to change and HN does not look any more like a community I want to be a part of than it did so many months ago.

What about by the quality of the discussion in the Apply HN submission? This was (as I understood the original experiment) to be the primary mechanism for selecting finalists.

Pinboard's application had the best discussion.