It's not for your comments. It's to promote a post for something that you think will earn you money (or something) if it gets a lot of traffic from HN.

There are many tech startup companies that pay for:

1. HN Upvotes 2. Product Hunt Upvotes 3. Github Stars

Why? Because it's all part of their marketing con. For some software companies, they rely on the hivemind to drive the purchase of their vaporware.

I doubt this is being used for comments. Hitting the front page of hn with a blog post or product launch is quite valuable - that's what people will be paying for.

Some people would pay good money to make a number on a forum go up.

They shuold try and contact the admins lmao it's just an int in a db at the end of the day

It's not for people who post personally to pad their egos. It's for marketing tech products and especially new SaaS platforms, to gain initial traction or give the appearance of an established and active community around it.

It's pretty obvious the benefit that a poster would get from upvotes. It doesn't take many to reach the frontpage and it's a guaranteed massive increase in traffic to your product.

At $40 for 50 upvotes it's hard to NOT buy upvotes for a small company trying to acquire customers.