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Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

As far as can tell, dang does a pretty good job fighting off sock-puppets and vote manipulation as things are.

Imagine if there was a multi-billion dollar industry focused on making fake accounts in order to increase vote counts for HN posts. I'd don't think dang would be very successful in fighting them off. So the claim that this is "immune to SEO" is debatable.

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Small-time voting fraud in the form of asking acquaintances to vote probably goes on all the time and frequently succeeds at securing a front page spot already; after all it only takes five votes or so. We occasionally see hard evidence of it when someone outright admits to this practice or solicits votes in the open on Twitter. People just don’t mind it that much because right now the practice doesn’t noticeably degrade the experience. Imagine if big money is suddenly involved at a much greater scale.

>Imagine if there was a multi-billion dollar industry focused on making fake accounts in order to increase vote counts for HN posts. I'd don't think dang would be very successful in fighting them off. So the claim that this is "immune to SEO" is debatable.

That's an easy one. Just ask for camera permission and record a video of the guy hitting the reply button. Have thousands of hamsters to analyze each one.

Yeah, I get the feeling the author doesn’t understand the problem i.e. distinguishing between natural and artificial signals.

HN is a market manipulator in its own right as it's controlled by YC and sometimes favors post related to startups they have a stake in.

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