I think you're right that that is not the point of HN, but I think HN attempts to automatically (and the HN moderators attempt to non-automatically in some cases) detect various kinds of voting abuse, including that kind. It's possible that these detection mechanisms are flawed and that this story was upvoted in that way but managed to get past those mechanisms, but another possibility is that people found the concept interesting and upvoted for that reason (or hoped for it to produce some interesting discussion). Many of the other comments (most of which do post-date your original complaint, of course) do seem to support the hypothesis that some HN users would find it interesting.
With that said (and assuming you have sufficient karma to flag stories), I think that believing a story to have reached the front page via such abusive voting would be a good reason to flag the story, which will bring it to the attention of the mods, who hopefully would be able to determine whether anything improper was in fact going on.
So do you think the mods are paid more than the marketers pushing stuff to the top? As a person who has benefited from having posts on the top of reddit I can tell you that there is a massive incentive to manipulate the system and that mods do not really have enough incentive or resources to stop them. It is basically like trying to keep drugs from crossing the border. The people who make money from the drugs can marshal massive resources in order to get the them across the border, and the will/resources just aren't there on the opposing side to really stop them.
r/gaming is massively gamed, r/news the mods are in on the gaming and have made it illegal to post links that don't lead to big news sources. This was done under the guise of making r/news more legit I guess, but it is hard to believe the fix wasn't in. Also mods of r/gaming are probably also in on it because there is just too much money at stake. Try to contact some of the users posting gta 5 gifs on the front page and see how real they are if you don't believe me.
It strains credibility to believe that this post had a massive number of upvotes in the first 3 hours and almost no comments, and it is a pretty blatant advertorial. I think it did gain some real traction after that, but when you boost something into a high visibility position it always generates some decent numbers. The question is would it have actually gotten to the top on its own? I really doubt it.
There is no smoking gun here and there never will be. It is incredibly easy to make 100 accounts on proxies and make some comments with them and then upvote a post. We are talking about one employee for less than a week of work. The payoff is very large and it is basically untraceable by mods. It happens all the time on reddit and hn.
"This seems to be the sort of thing that would come to the top on its own."
Maybe, but not in that time period.
"Also, this isn't Reddit. The commuity and moderation are pretty different here."
If anything Reddit does more to defend against this sort of thing.
"do big advertisers even know about us?"
I have seen so many posts on the top of hn talking about "the hn effect" It is ridiculous to think that people in pr and marketing aren't paying attention to that, while gaming product hunt and reddit.
I own a software studio that makes software and I am noticing how vulnerable HN is. Other people have obviously noticed as well.
