For one of the (few) stories I've submitted, I asked friends to take a look and upvote the story if they found it interesting - not all of them did. I felt tha

For one of the (few) stories I've submitted, I asked friends to take a look and upvote the story if they found it interesting - not all of them did. I felt that approach was okay because I routinely recommend my friends to stuff I find interesting and, since I posted the story here, I obviously thought it was interesting. The votes I got were still based on merit, though, even if I did generate a little bit of extra attention trying to get those votes. That said, this is a really hard problem because it goes against the way humans operate. We learn to trust or distrust certain sources and that affects the way we view information we get from them - it simply takes too much time to evaluate the trustworthiness of everything we encounter. I don't have any specific suggestions (although I'll be thinking about it), but maybe a system that operated with that in mind would have better success even as it grew in popularity.