I know this is the Internet we have to live with, but this kind of stuff just makes it a worse place to be.
I see this less as "gaming HN" than "realising what the niche is" and fulfilling the niche. I guess I'm fine with someone posting first about a subject that will be there anyway? Maybe I'm not seeing something.
I read the article in the spirit of the headline, which is basically: we wrote a bot to tell us stuff that would do well on HN so we can shill our/our clients’ stuff. In other words, HN becomes an echo chamber of rephrased news articles recycled into commercial blogspam.
So they didn't really hack HN, they merely provided content HN likes and did at the right time. I wonder if they could hack it more by only providing divisive content that feeds on outrage. That'd bring comments and points but most likely no new clients or conversions.
Oh, and I have a good example of that ! The other days there was a submission about a font from intel designed for visually deficient programmers. I got curious and installed it then I started thinking about ligatures in code, googled a bit and read https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fon...
I found the article interesting and decided to submit it but when pasting the title I thought "uh, with a title like that, there's going to be some strong reactions/opinions" and indeed the top comment thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35926574
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927503
>> Can someone explain me why people post links to Wikipedia articles without any context?
> For the exact same reason people post links to other things, it's interesting. It's always been more "hacker" than "news" here.*
[1] It's branding/marketing/groupthink...