Actually, this is an interesting case. It looks to me like the early votes were real, but then a bunch of later voters showed up to promote the story. Perhaps teammates got wind of their startup being on HN.<p>All: promotional voting is bad on HN. It&#x27;s against the rules, users hate it and are good at detecting it, and we penalize accounts and sites that do it.<p>In this case, though, there clearly was some real community interest, so we&#x27;ve reduced the penalty on the story. Hopefully the thread can focus on the actual startup now.