Apparently 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. If you don't, flag it or move on.

There is no way that 15 people found it useful and/or interesting. It's someone giving a brief resume and then, in a nutshell, saying "Gonna be doing stuff with data".

So my question stands. Do people just see 37 signals and data and imagine that it's interesting, so they up-arrow? Are there bots at work? Etc. I am deeply curious.

It seems like so many of the other articles about 37 signals go roughly "37S wrote this blog post that proves that they listen to no one other than themselves and are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot," so in that sense, it is worthwhile to HN to see that do have people who are listening to customers / drawing inference from data / &c.

Bots? Maybe?

37 Signals is a pretty popular company so I imagine people get excited for any kind of inside information on their inner workings.

Also, the upvote is a good way to bookmark something to read later (ie. upvote => saved stories). That has to account for some of it.

The article basically states

"We at 37 signals try to collect and analyze data about our users to make our products better. We may share some of what we do in later posts."

It is being upvoted here on HN because it plants a good idea into people's heads:

"I've heard about this new trend about using data to optimize your app, and it turns out those cool 37s guys are doing it. Maybe I should too!"