Submitting a story with a bad title would make for a similar, if weaker, exploit for Hacker News.

A key to this would be to make the title boring rather than offensive so that it doesn't get flagged but rather slips off "new" into oblivion. You can also use a handy chart [1] to pick the worst time to post. As a bonus you'll also get karma from all the people legitimately trying to submit the story.

A pertinent question: can you come up with a sufficiently boring title for any story?

[1] http://nathanael.hevenet.com/the-best-time-to-post-on-hacker...

HN's dupe detector is so weak that you can just add ?reposting or something to the URL and it will get another chance.

People (like me) notice this, and don't appreciate it.

When you think it through completely, you'll see there's good reason for the dupe detector to be lenient. In the early days of HN (or earlier, as "Startup News"), avoiding dupes was more important since the rate of submissions to the /newest queue was fairly slow. These days, the rate of submissions is very brisk, so a lot of really great stuff floats by basically unnoticed. Allowing for a second chance actually makes sense.

If you have "Show Dead" on, you'll see there are a lot of people submitting who have their submissions immediately marked [dead]. If you've studied how HN is built, you'll see pg (et al) tends to follow an "Enough Rope" design policy -- this is from the old expression "Give him enough rope to hang himself, and he will." It seems if you intentionally and repeatedly abuse the lenient dupe detector to promote something, you will be noticed, silently, and handled accordingly.

People notice this and realize there is a reason they have done so.

This is very incorrect.

Things get stuck in the spam filter all the time for a variety of reasons independent of keywords in the title. Multiple accounts, new accounts, or something else can trigger it. In any event, most moderators are really swift to free up things that aren't spam and otherwise comply with that subreddit's rules.

This evil plan falls apart quite rapidly because when a story is freed from the spam filter it jumps to the top of the new queue regardless of its age. This is why you'll sometimes see something that's an hour old sandwiched between submissions that are minutes old.

TL;DR I need to get off reddit and do some work.

You do realise this post is from 2010, and it was on the front page of Reddit and HN back then, so it wouldn't be hard to think that someone may have fixed it since then!

No, I didn't realize it was from 2010.

My comment still stands though: this post is incorrect. It may have been correct way back in the day when I was a Digg user, but now it's wrong.

A lot of people, like me, won't read the date of the post and will assume that this is still how reddit works. My comment illustrates how reddit works today.

You can append something like ?foo=1 to submit a new URL.

I wonder if HN should permit duplicate URLs. Maybe with a message saying that the URL has already been posted and asking if you're sure you want to double post (I think that might be what Reddit does?).

As long as people are smarter than the algorithms, this is a danger. It's like bizarro SEO in that way.

I remember when we used to just be able to append ?x to the url and it allowed duplicates.

I believe you still can - works on HN and reddit.

Mallory's a guy?

I had always thought Mallory was the female name and Mallet was the male name for the second attacker. I did a little digging and it seems that Mallory is primarily a girl's name it can also be a boy's name.