"Can I ask people to upvote my submission?
No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I'm working on a blog post about the problem of upvote begging. Usually, it's in the minority of users, although some websites don't explicitly enforce it well. (Case in point, Product Hunt makes upvote begging part of the status quo, which compromises the integrity of the site as a whole.)
Solve that, and you have much more traction to complain about what people should or shouldn't be doing.
Even then, two wrongs don't make a right. It comes down to luck, and sometimes it doesn't pan out. "Growth hacking" to correct bad luck is not necessarily ethical.
People are lazy, yes, but when there's monetary/reputation values tied to placement, the incentives change.
Anecdotally, new accounts are penalized too even if they vote from /newest (to prevent blatant vote manipulation via sock puppets)
That just seems like a silly thing to do. Especially since there's an obvious way around it.
This is why I left digg and reddit. The upvote circle of promotion with armies of article upvoters and comment upvoters/downvoters ruined these sites for me.
This is the reason for the infamous IF YOU LIKE THIS VIDEO LIKE/SUBSCRIBE/COMMENT! phrasing that has plagued modern YouTube.
The comment is a tweet, which ordinarily is only seen by the user's Twitter followers.
For a sufficiently small community this assumption is fairly safe though even then not always true. As communities grow their population trends towards the average (for many characteristics) and the average human is more likely to be driven by the latter motivations than the former, at least as I understand psychology, though I would be very interested to learn otherwise.
tl;dr: I think the assumption that a submitter is motivated more by wanting to make a good contribution over having their HN submission 'win' is shortsighted.