You might be wondering how you can win Shacknews.
The answer is: You probably shouldn't try.
https://www.shacknews.com/cortex/article/668/8mikey-won-shacknews-for-the-week-january-31-2021
1 million points. Every article on Shacknews has been read. There are no more article points to be made. There will be articles posted this year, but you can assume those will be read too.
Your only hope to match this number is to read all the articles yourself. Without cheating, this involves loading the article in a browser and scrolling down the page far enough for the Javascript to trigger that awards points. Simply do this 120,000 times.
And what then? Now you are in a tie. So lets look at some other ways you can get points:
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Publishing Cortex articles
At 25 points each, this seems like a promising way to farm Cortex points. You can create them without comments, seems super stealthy... but even generating a Cortex preview posts increments the last Cortex article id. Spamming out thousands of these will create thousands of invalid Cortex article ids. Gaming the system for a joke is one thing, but don't crap up the database.
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Replying to posts
Replying a bunch in an active thread just makes you annoying. Don't do that. You also might be tempted to find some expired thread and just go to town replying to yourself in a thread from 2008. Don't do that either.
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Tagging posts
Lighting up an active thread like a Christmas tree again makes you an annoying chode. You could go back and tag ancient posts instead. If you're courteous, you'll even untag after. At only 1 point a tag, that's a lot of churn. It's 10x the load on the database as reading articles. Remember all this activity has to be put in the database somewhere. You're just crapping up the place.
In other words...
