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> many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front page

That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other.

From my perspective—but of course we don't see everything—HN's anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough. It's not uncommon for there to be a high-quality project that someone has put months or years into, and then naively tries to promote on HN (edit: I mean by asking friends to upvote). Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. (If you think the opposite should be obvious, try communicating anything to a large-enough audience. The vast majority never get the message.) If we didn't override the voting ring detector in such cases, some really good work would be lost to the audience here, which wouldn't benefit HN. Of course this is rare enough; most ring-voted submissions aren't very good. But years of working on this problem have taught me that the best voting ring detector would not be one that penalizes submissions; it would just turn all ring-votes into no-ops.

Often people think that's what they're supposed to do.

I recall a discussion here many many years ago where we agreed that we wanted that- it was a cool part of the site. I didn't realize it changed.

Ask friends to upvote? Surely that was never a thing.

Edit: my comment upthread was unclear so I added a bit.

You are correct: asking friends to upvote has always been discouraged.

Wait, are you suggesting that people shouldn’t post their own stuff to HN? Or by “promote on HN”, do you mean posting on Twitter and telling people to go upvote?

Definitely not suggesting that! Sorry for the ambiguity. Of course it's fine for people to share their own work here (assuming it's on topic—but anything intellectually interesting is on topic).

By 'naively tries to promote on HN' I mean things like asking friends to upvote and passing links around on Twitter. Those tactics don't work (or at least as far as I know they don't) and usually hurt the submission rather than help it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that’s what I figured, but I wanted to clarify since PH actually does seem to do it the other way. Thanks!

One of the reasons I call out voting manipulation is that people do it on HN unintentionally, mostly due to Product Hunt normalizing it. (atleast people aren’t taking out Twitter ads advertising HN submissions)

I have zero problem with someone announcing on social media that they launched on HN. If they have a following it's because they have (or had) something interesting to say there. If that's the case and they have launched something, then there's a >0 chance that it is also interesting. If nothing else, it's interesting solely for the purpose of being more plugged in to what the masses think is or should be popular, even if I disagree.

At the risk of being hypocritical, I do have a problem with the opposite: coded messages to followers to flag en masse a post for basically any reason. The effects of flagging en masse vs. voting en masse are exaggerated as the data in the article illustrates. An optional email to moderators expressing the concern plus one personal flag is the appropriate response there, imo.

Then, to be straightforward about it, you have zero problem with people who have large Twitter followings controlling the front page of the site, because that's what you'd get if Twitter canvassing wasn't heavily penalized.

No, but I'd rather have sophisticated vote ring detection instead of mods having to police the verbiage used in a social media post on another platform. Or having to worry myself about being too excited about my product's launch.

The policing of verbiage is so hard. If I posted the exact same thing to my followers that some paid influencer did, the effect would me markedly different. I would likely get 0-2 votes from my post, because I have real world friends as followers few of whom have accounts here. My point is that the same words used by different people can have very different implied meaning and outcomes.

It just doesn't make sense to me to judge a post on the words used(1) instead of looking at the voting patterns. For example, what if someone not involved with the project just loves it and spontaneously posts about it? Should the project creators be punished for that independent act? I'd say, yes, but only if it looks like a vote ring.

(1) You could make an exception for blatant vote begging, but even that would be caught by a good vote ring algorithm.

Part of the problem is the mindset that you're being "punished" when a story about your project is kept off the front page.

In any case, you have to look at the whole thing as a system. If you allow people to point to their HN submissions on Twitter, the site will be unduly influenced by Twitter, rather than by the community that actually uses and contributes to the site. It's not a matter of intention --- I'm annoyed too that I can't casually link to things from Twitter! --- but of empirical fact.

I disagree with this interpretation because there is zero reason to draw attention to an HN submission as it is being posted unless you have an ulterior motive. Especially with people who try to advertise using the /newest trick (which doesn’t work) and remove plausible deniability in the process.

If it hits #1 on the front page after a bit of time, sure, humblebrag away on Twitter.