HN has been astroturfed for a while. Ever notice low quality linkedin blogspam that hits the front page before people would even have had time to finish reading it?

It's hard to disambiguate this from people who have a "fanbase." People will upvote stuff from people like simonw sight unseen without reading. I'd like to do a study on HN where you hide the author, to see how upvote patterns change, in order to demonstrate the "halo" benefit.