Poll: Do you ask friends to upvote your submissions?
Related to this thread about needing links to appear on the Home page instead of just the New page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075816
1) I get 47 of my closest friends to mindlessly vote it up in some kind of vote exchange black market.
2) I get one or perhaps two close friends who have read the submission and genuinely like it to vote up so that my submission has a chance to stand on its own merit.
#1 is bad, and makes HN cheap. #2 though is a rational response to a broken system.
I think the right approach to #1 is to algorithmically detect and squash it. The right approach to #2 is to figure out why it's even necessary to do that, and change the system such that it's no longer necessary at all.
And if they're 'critical' upvotes I wouldn't have much of a problem with it but if they are upvotes just because your friend wrote whatever then that's really the 'road to digg'.
From my own research I can see we are still quite a few 'yes' votes short.
That out of the way, it'd be cool if there were a way to more easily track "good" new submissions. I browse the /new page perhaps once or twice a day (at most) so a lot of good stuff is going to have passed me by. Being able to see new stuff from a "favorite" set of users would be kinda cool (or even the top 100) but might break the dynamic of the site..?