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Comment by cbg0 | Hacker News Reader

Having your friends upvote your posts on HN doesn't mean HN "favors" you.

> Can I ask people to upvote my submission? [1]

> No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to promote. HN's software penalizes submissions, accounts, and sites that break this rule, so please don't.

"A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted." [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7543910

Yep, too bad not everyone follows the rules. It's the same with everything that can be gamed from search results to taxes.

Even if it is only as innocent as having your friends mass upvoting every thread of yours, then this is an outright exploitation of HN rules. Again never happened that a company, especially a company that was started a few months ago and hardly known by anybody, gets to the frontpage with a 100% hit rate for more than 10 times in less than 3 months.

Sure, that's very much against HN's rules. Also against HN's rules is posting accusations about these things without evidence. I've looked extensively into these cases, mainly because you've drummed up such a fuss about them with your various accounts. I found zero evidence of abuse. All the data indicates that these threads have been upvoted by serious, longstanding HN community members are just genuinely interested in the topic—probably because of the lineage of the founders, who are well known to this community and whose work many people like to follow.

You've now crossed way beyond the point of trolling, including barraging us with hostile emails, and it's time to drop it and move on.

There is no accusation, you're just playing with words to deflect the situation and make it on me instead on the real issue here which is about a company that had more frontpage posts of free positive publicity than most FAANG companies in the last month with a staggering 100% hit rate.

As someone who has spent years upon years fighting with and against corrupt subreddit mods+astroturfing users on reddit:

HN can't do much about upvotes coming from friends if they're sufficiently distributed/no patterns to find.

Also, please consider: their posts are just good/stimulate great discussion across multiple sectors of tech (networking meshing applies to ALMOST EVERYONE!).

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