Ask HN: Is it okay to ask friends to upvote a submission?

I don't know if I would be comfortable with this kind of stuff. Hacker News is read by many people and if your post inherently has something to be liked, it will most likely be. You can then expect it to go viral from there.

But requesting that your friends upvote your posts shows that you're expecting to garner attention by the number of upvotes you've gathered. It doesn't matter if you say "upvote this if you like this", most friends will upvote just for your sake, some might not even take a look.

IMHO, just let the content of your posts/links speak for themselves.

From what I've read, no. But I think you can link them to what you've posted, and that's probably something that would naturally happen anyway.

The link convention is "Hacker News discussion here" or "discuss this on Hacker News." Either way, there is no call for upvotes.

There is a voting ring detector built in to the sw. But pg does not discuss how it works. Its not FTG there are rule here;)

New accounts would probably set off an alarm but considering HN is so basic in every other respect I can't see detection of normal active accounts group voting being in effect.