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Ask PG: Are friends upvoting friends looked down upon on HN?
I'll occasionally post something and have a few friends take a look at it and then upvote it if they like it, just to get over the initial hump of upvotes.
Recently, some of those friends have been upvoting some of my articles but their votes don't seem to be counting.
Is there some sort of rule against friends upvoting their friends?
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThere are measures to detect voting rings, and it's plausible that you've triggered the detection mechanism. Think about the problem. Anyone can create a dozen accounts and upvote their own stories - of course there has to be some protection against it. If you and your friends participate regularly and upvote other stories as well then you're less likely to have a problem, but the exact algorithm isn't public, so I can't say with certainty.
- borski 16y agoRight, I grok that, which was why I asked. Both of the people whose votes aren't counting in this case also participate regularly... And, on top of that, when I upvote their stories, it works just fine. Hence the confusion, and question re: clarification from PG.
- SamReidHughes 16y agoEven if there wasn't, how are friends distinguishable from an automatic voting ring? Even if they were distinguishable from a voting ring, it still makes sense for their upvotes to be ignored (since they're artificial votes, and a poor measure of a submission's value). There could very well be some other logic at work, too, like being more likely to ignore votes by people who visited the submission directly, or ignoring votes that happen too soon for the voter to really have read the article. It is fun to speculate. Do your friends ever upvote other submissions? It would be useful to consider this.
- borski 16y agoDo your friends ever upvote other submissions? It would be useful to consider this. Yes. Just to be clear, I'm not offended or trying to subvert the system; I'm just trying to understand what the process is. I imagine fighting spam on HN is a pretty difficult job, and catching voting rings is useful. These aren't necessarily artificial votes, since I'm not forcing anybody to upvote an article; they get to make their own decisions, haha. All I do is bring it to their attention.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoGiven your other answers all I can suggest is that you email PG direct and ask, including names. His email can be found in or deduced from the various FAQ files. I don't have it to hand.