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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Observation: this is a time sensitive post by the forum's owner/maintainer/main moderator on the original topic of the forum. Yet, he did not need to rely on a "sticky" thread or any other kind of special modifier.

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"Sticky" threads are typically seen in forums where the threads are ordered by time of most recent comment. They make more sense in that context.

One may also assume they're necessary in a forum where new posts are buried less than an hour after they're posted.

Why have a special modifier when you can just change the amount of upvotes to whatever you want? ;)

I believe there would inevitably be some blowback stemming from that sort of behaviour...

I know, I was just joking...

What makes you say that?

Well, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek, but eventually the truth would come out and users would be outraged - it's simply not worth it. Besides I just don't think PG has the mentality to do something like that :-)

To promote a message to the community, I certainly don't see why people would be outraged :P

We're mostly assuming pg would admit it right away ("I added 100 upvotes so people would see this"), not that he'd try to do it behind our backs :p

Couldn't he have just rigged the algorithms to put this post at the top? That would be the backdoor equivalent of the "sticky" post.

It would actually be more interesting to me if pg had some quantitative way of knowing that this post would reach the top (some function of the # of YC applicants now nervously refreshing), but if I had to guess, I'd say he just knew from experience or something.

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