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Thanks for the tip. I haven't used any puppet accounts to upvote or comment but my friends did upvote this post... mainly because they are my friends. Is that against HN rules? I think this is something the community at large would appreciate and I don't think it's reasonable to knock it from the front page because I have friends that work in the same building. Is there a better way to approach this? Thanks man!

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If your friends just created the account to upvote you (or they only use the account to upvote your stories) then there is no too much difference between a friend (aka meatpupet) a sockpupet and a bot. (The system also detects voting rings and other methods to game the site.)

If your friends are regular users, they would have understand the explicit and implicit guidelines of the site, and upvote stories because they are interesting. (Another unexpected behavior is to write empty one-line comments. It looks like astroturfing and are generally downvoted.)

There's a difference between having a couple friends upvote your post, and having over 20 friends upvote your post (this submission has 28 points, but your real karma is only 4).

Everyone thinks that their submission is good. That's why a fair voting system is necessary to let the community decide what is genuinely good.

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