I've been doing a fair bit of promotion and marketing, because "you build it and they will come" rarely works, even if your stuff is good. But I'm sure any dev who has launched anything already knows that.

I posted this here with close to 0 expectations, because my posts in HN usually don't get much attention. If you've seen this on Reddit, you should know it was very well received in multiple subs, so getting a bit more than 20 upvotes here wouldn't be something out of the ordinary.

Yeah nice try but HN detected the voting abnormality and removed your post.

The rank of the post got affected by the flamewar detector, not because of voting abnormality.

Please don't break the HN guidelines by insinuating this kind of thing without evidence—they're quite explicit about that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), for good reason because most such insinuations are just pure perception. The internet is a bit Rohrshcach diagram that way.

If you're worried about vote manipulation, that doesn't mean you should do nothing! But what you should do is email [email protected] so we can investigate. We always do.

It's not removed. Sorry to disappoint your conspiracy theory.

Try checking HN front page on a different IP and account ;-)

Try checking like page number 5/6. This post has 30 upvotes, not 300.

I must know you from somewhere. A random stranger wouldn't spend so much time obsessing and being jealous over my medicore success post.

Based on your green nickname, you probably even registered just to come comment on my post. I advice you to stop wasting time on such activities.

Your post got like 30 upvotes in 30 minutes (paid for) which made it rocket up to the front page. The HN mod team then manually removed it from the front page due to vote manipulation. Notice how after your paid votes ran out nobody else gave it many more additional votes - still hovering around 30.