Launch day LinkedIn - the flood of solicitors - is this normal?

During our first launch today and I have been shocked by the volume / the literal flood of paid promotion solicitation. I've been kindly telling them "we don't have a budget for that but we would obviously love your organic support" but holy moly that is a lot of folks telling me they can leverage their community to "beat the system" and get organic votes.

Obviously we all want to win POTD / week / month etc - but that kinda takes the fun out of the whole competitive nature of this PH Launch journey / what makes this community unique etc.

I'd imagine the team does a really solid job behind the scenes flagging those upvotes and comments - but I do wonder if some of the real comments and real upvotes get lost in that shuffle due to this massive influx of pay for click day of promotion.

Don't have an answer as we're in the throws of pushing the product but I wanted to know if other people shared this experience and from the @product team - I'd love to learn more about the vetting mechanisms you've got to limit this stuff (because I am sure its pretty robust haah!)

Anyhoo - back to the launch pushing but - just thought it would be neat to share some real time thoughts and express my gratitude for those folks supporting our launch and the other products launching today!