Some of these comments were left by my friends, so I can say that these are real people who are in the topic or are interested, but they are just laconic and restrained in their assessments)
The best part is how little effort went into faking the praise. It's just so blatant, I am somehow left doubting its not fake praise, but fake-fake praise; purposely left there to undermine the link.
I understand the logic but that's overthinking it. It's just people trying to help their friends and not realizing how much they're breaking local conventions.
Believe it or not we got three (edit: four) panicked emails from someone claiming to be related to the project authors who thought it would be a nice surprise to 'help' them out on HN this way. I believed her and told her to let them know they could repost in a few weeks, so long as there would be no more 'help'.
Actually this sort of obvious voting ring is the least of our worries; at this point it basically never has any effect other than grumpy comments by HN users who easily see through it, and often the culprits turn out to be people who are actually doing good work and are clueless about how to promote it, i.e. people much like the rest of us. Why they don't simply post it to HN with a description of why it's interesting is beyond me.
Just in case you are reaching a wrong conclusion, if someone creates a few new account just to upvote the story, then the system detects it and it doesn't improve the rank of the submission. It doesn't mater if they just upvote or they upvote and write a non substantial comment. Also, it doesn't mater if they are a lot of real fans that are not HN users, or they are just virtual sockpuppets. (I don't know the details, it's part of the secret sauce.)
If you have lots of real fans, it's useful that they help to give relevant technical replies to the questions that the HN users. (My recommendation is to avoid exclamation marks and oneliners, try to write at least three lines of text.)
