Thanks for responding, and I don't mean to waste your time, but that seems like a bug. We have a single ip, that 4 people can use, and none of them knew of the hn post until after the post was demoted. In fact, I don't think any of them have a hn account!
On top of this, I didn't share the link with anyone, and the votes appeared to be totally organic.
Our target market is not the hn crowd, and this subsequent post was merely out of curiosity, so I have very little to gain by lying.
Edit: if you or your team wanted any more information for debugging purposes I would be happy to oblige, just let me know if I can help, though I understand if this is fairly low priority!
It maybe set off the vote ring detector because your costumers seem to be located all around London. So it may be possible that some of them shared the submission with other London users or that because they know your company they up-vote it; making it look like it was ringed but it was just selection bias.
Anyway this is a tricky problem; because at the end of the day intent is a fundamental part of vote rings and that can be really hard to see by algorithms alone.
On top of this, I didn't share the link with anyone, and the votes appeared to be totally organic.
Our target market is not the hn crowd, and this subsequent post was merely out of curiosity, so I have very little to gain by lying.
Edit: if you or your team wanted any more information for debugging purposes I would be happy to oblige, just let me know if I can help, though I understand if this is fairly low priority!