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Comment by kenko | Hacker News Reader

This "vote brigading" thing is ridiculous. Are we to believe that no one else involved tweeted or otherwise publicized their candidacy?

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Let's be clear; this wasn't just somebody tweeting about their Apply HN. It was explicit and repeated requests to vote specifically for him, going to a couple of orders of magnitude more followers than a normal person would have. What would be ridiculous is for the results to be determined by who has the biggest social networking presence.

Dude, any election is a social thing. To pretend otherwise is to kid yourself. If you don't want a popularity contest across social networks, don't have public voting - simple as.

> It was explicit and repeated requests to vote specifically for him

Where, exactly? His Twitter feed contains a single link to each of his original Apply HN and the later poll (plus one link-less joke about the poll). I mean, yes, he has a big following, and yes, he promoted his application (which everyone involved admits he would not have done if he had thought it was against the rules). But "explicit and repeated" makes it sound like a lot more than one (humorous) tweet per poll.

And it's not like he used a personal account, either. That one doesn't mention it at all. It's just @Pinboard - and frankly, it would be weird if you didn't think current customers would want to support you in growing your business.

Three tweets that contained a link that solicited votes, which is almost certainly three more than the median applicant. It'd be more if you also counted links without the requests to vote.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/727255170594131968 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/720802750317993984 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/719599297604390912

And sorry, claiming they were just jokes can't be a free pass. Everything about that application was framed as a joke from start to finish.

If they did so publicly, you can tell dang about it...

That's not really relevant; I don't think it's our job, or anyone else's, to police the internet for 'vote brigading.' In this case, it was never against the stated rules.

It's definitely against HN's rules and is in the FAQ:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

That specifically refers to submitted stories.

I think it is dodgy to have an online election, and then disqualify participants for mentioning it to people who might want to vote for them.

I don't see a distinction there. It refers to submissions, and Apply HN posts were submissions, a.k.a. stories in HN's sense (posts that aren't comments).

Certainly it never crossed my mind that the rules about voting rings would be any different than with regular posts. HN users are passionately opposed to the voting system getting gamed; we'd have been skinned alive if we allowed it. But tptacek makes a good point about that not being obvious to everybody.

The post he provided a link to wasn't his Apply HN submission; it was the run-off poll.

I told him when I noticed the same Twitter post that it was going to cause problems (too late!), and he was genuinely surprised.

He did also provide an earlier link to all the Apply HN submissions (not his alone).

Right - I agree with you, in general. I just think that this particular situation is a bit different, and Apply HN implies that there are folks outside HN applying /to/ HN. Those folks outside HN may have no idea about the voting rules, and it also isn't clear, even to long-time HN users, that this wasn't a different situation entirely.

Do you think I would have consciously sabotaged my chances by breaking this rule had I been aware of it? Especially knowing that YC would be looking for any pretext to disqualify me?

Your rules about voting rings are not public. I think that you're so used to modding the site that you forget this, but take a look at the letter of what it actually says in the FAQ.

No, I don't think that for a minute.

I'm confused by your second paragraph—I just don't get it—but if there's a way to make the FAQ clearer I'd like to. There's no question that I have trouble seeing this stuff from an outside viewpoint. I'm too immersed in it.

By the way, I didn't reply to the bit about the voting rules because I think it's the only important point in your post; it isn't. It's just something that I knew how to respond to. I'm trying to write something in response to the larger substance, but am having trouble because my feelings (bad, and sad) have the better of me right now. I'll get there.

You've managed to personally lose an astonishing amount of credibility, and this has managed to do a shocking amount of damage to the YC brand. I literally just came from three different bars (hey, it was a good night) in SF and overheard no less than five different conversations about this clusterfuck. Obviously YC/HN doesn't give a shit (because sama could easily drop 20k like a rock and not care), but it looks super bad.

Holy crap. You need to go to different bars!

Haha, this may be the best comment of all. For once, I'd just like to go to a bar and talk about Trump. Is that too much to ask? :)

Why do think I kept leaving!?

I can't reply to dan's reply to this, for some reason, but regarding "I don't see a distinction there. It refers to submissions, and Apply HN posts were submissions, a.k.a. stories in HN's sense (posts that aren't comments).", well, it also says that users should vote for "a story" because it's "intellectually interesting", which is not a rationale (or in the case of "story" a referring term) that seems to make much sense in the present case. So it makes a lot of sense, I think, to construe it as referring to submissions in the narrower sense.

Regardless, the tweets in question were around a long time before Pinboard was disqualified without expectation. The first one certainly predates kevin's phone call, for instance.

(And of course one of the tweets in question was contained a link to the general poll, which was not a submission of Maciej's, and the other, technically, was a link to all the Apply HN posts, not to his.)

Yup! And I don't intend to ever do that.

But that says nothing about the Apply HN situation. That's new, had a different set of rules (hell, you wrote a polling solution), and the regular guidelines didn't necessarily apply. That they did should have been made clear.

Again, nothing against it this time, since it's all up to you guys - just feedback for the next time.

Why is the FAQ not linked within the Guidelines page (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? To me, that is a guideline... you wouldn't look at the FAQ before posting something.

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