i'm the article's author. a moment ago, i came to hn as i normally do throughout the week. my heart skipped a beat* when i saw my tc post was on here; i didn't tell anyone to upvote. for whatever that's worth.

* it's unfortunate that my reaction to seeing myself on hn is less "cool, readers!" and more "oh no, i'm about to get ripped apart in the comments"

HN has a lot of anti-voting ring protection, so I doubt it would have stayed in #2 for long if this were the case.

There’s been some talk about this in other threads, but I’m still confused how it could tell the difference between a voting ring and a legitimately popular article without having many false positives.

I’m curious about this too, but I don’t think they’ll talk openly about it. For some hints, you could probably look at what data Google reCaptcha collects. The newest version (v3) doesn’t even require a user to click anything except a single button.

I bet Reddit and HN use timing, browsing time, clicks, and mouse movements, among other things to tell if a lot of visitors are just coming to the site to upvote a single story or are genuinely browsing the site before coming across something interesting.

I avoid talking about because I don't want people getting ideas, but it's easy to detect voting rings with HTTP referers and voting history alone

Content marketing is usually easy enough to tell; even if upvoted by a voting ring, it'll be mercilessly flagged down.

The flip side I don’t hear about is using up/down votes to shape discussions. You’ll often read discussion on the same topic with drastically different sentiment at the top.

Not clear that you can really monetize HN subscribers except if you have something that would probably rise in the rankings on its own.

Of course that's what all anti-SEO people would say. Hmm.