Have to love HN cynicism. This most certainly is not blogspam. Allow me to explain the "utterly disjoint and aimless essay" and "born-yesterday-lauditory" accounts (of which I may be lauditory, but hardly born-yesterday).

Firstly, English is not Joanne's first language. Mandarin is. She's been working on her English ever since I last worked with her in Manhattan, where our product manager was a native Mandarin speaker and provided real-time translation between her and our team.

Secondly, she was unaware that this article was submitted to HN. I sent her a text message congratulating her on making the front page; I can only assume she shared it with her friends as well given her utter surprise. And her friends come from a network of native Chinese. So, (again an educated guess) they probably signed up, not knowing the HN community guidelines, and proceeded to post congratulations as well.

How about we give people the benefit of the doubt before assuming malice.

> How about we give people the benefit of the doubt before assuming malice.

I think considering how harmful voting rings and blogspam can be, and how easily a community can deteriorate as a result, it's probably prudent to assume malice in these cases and to be corrected by someone such as yourself. Much as I wish things to be different.

Well said.

Given the utterly disjoint and aimless essay, and the born-yesterday-lauditory accounts, I'm going to call this as some new blogspam reputation attack on HN.

Speaking of which, the "new" queue has been getting espeically bad, though how much of that is my having enabled "showdead" a few weeks back, I'm not sure.

I can't speak for the accounts that cropped up posting comments, but I'm the original HN submitter for this article (not the author) and I can assure you there's no blogspamming happening on my part.

I guess the one thing I'd ask is what you saw in this piece that was worth submitting.

It's a nice summary about the challenges that that UX designer faced working with a B2B app.

Wow, so many accounts created 45 minutes ago and commenting on this post. Something is fishy.

We've banned those accounts for sockpuppet voting and commenting.

That is kinda odd.

Not entirely sure I got the point other than as a basic intro to applying metrics to design goals.

Marketing, perhaps?

Personal note: I worked with Joanne a few years back at a startup in Manhattan. She helped to improve our product in a very short timeframe. A pleasure to work with; the very definition of a professional.