Hacker News Post Manipulation

Ryan Breslow shares a story about alleged manipulation of Hacker News rankings between Bolt and Stripe posts.

"We had a post I'd written catered to YC audience about how we do fraud detection better and guarantee it with payments, which was radical and new at the time. It had organically gotten to number 1 and held there. We had tons of comments, very active people, very interested.

Then Stripe's post started to rise, and ours just started to fall and then disappeared. I don't know if it was editorial manipulation - there's also this downvote functionality where you can have your employees or friends go and downvote. Whatever it was, they were able to get us off of there pretty quickly.

We had some posts, one in particular that had gotten to number one, held there with a ton of comments on it. You can go read all my comments. Stripe's post - I don't know if it was there before, it seems like they said it got posted technically before - but after ours got to number one, theirs started to rise and ours disappeared."