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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It's because voting rings don't work that you like the site. If anyone could game their way to the top spot by asking their friends to upvote stuff (and believe me, people constantly try), News.YC wouldn't be worth reading.

The articles about YC-funded companies don't get voted up because of voting rings. (Forgive me if I don't explain the statistical differences by which I can tell this.) They get upvoted because practically every YC founder reads this site, and they're interested in news about their friends. At worst it's a bias in the composition of the audience, not people consciously gaming the system.

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I agree I don't want this turning into Reddit (not that it's bad but it's now all politics & images focused) but I have a lot of friends in YC, my start-up is with a YC person (chris smoak) and non-YC start-up friends as well vote for my articles.

I think bottom line is that if the YC community doesn't like the articles<br /> a) they won't click or read it <br /> b) they won't vote additionally after I have asked my start-up related friends to vote (not spam in the least bit)<br />

so is the solution that i only ask my yc friends to vote for my articles?

How many friends did you have vote? If you get enough friends to make your story an instant #1, there is a problem. The story needs to float to the top on its own merit for it to be considered legitimate. If your content was great, things would be different, but this story is incredibly mediocre, especially compared to the current top stories. In some parts it is also wrong or at least incomplete, Hi5 became successful by very aggressively asking for gmail/hotmail/yahoo passwords and spamming everyone in the address book to join Hi5, MySpace had a pay dating site where they told everyone "use MySpace," etc.

Also, reddit, unlike digg, has yet to be taken over by voting rings which is one reason it is so much better than digg. If you suspect otherwise, please email me...

rms. I IMed about ~10 of them thinking that 50% would actually upvote. I do agree that getting it on the homepage and letting the community decide is good. I will try to not have my "ring" be so helpful. rms, vote for me:P

Do you have an email address? I am impressed that you managed to cheat the system rather well, get noticed, and not be banned. Hopefully you understand the way it works now.

This community here is great in that the system works and the best content makes it to the front page. Generally the community is offended by the notion that anyone would ever actively solicit votes for a story rather than letting the system decide. It's basically a taboo topic.

News.YC is at the opposite end of the spectrum as digg, where secret cabals of top ranked diggers choose the stories on the front page.

Anyways, please send me an email or post yours in your profile so we could talk about social media. There is a feature on this site where your email address is only available to site admins. You have to put in a despammed version in your about me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100

news [at] okdork.com is the best way to reach me.

i honestly don't think i cheated the system. i didn't realize it was illegal to ask people who read yc to upvote my articles. i should read the small print next time:) plus my article was on the homepage for about 5 seconds which isn't useful to the readers or myself.

i guess next time i will just have a few votes to get on the homepage and if it sucks then it won't go anywhere.

You don't need to ask anyone to vote for your articles. If your friends are News.YC users and like your articles, they'll vote for them anyway.

I wouldn't advise asking even News.YC reading friends to upvote your stories because it is, statistically, flamingly obvious when people do that, and sites that do it repeatedly eventually get banned.

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