> Once he was on board, I went to work lining up a team of upvoters from different IP addresses. Following Alex’s strategy, we wanted to get as many upvotes as

> Once he was on board, I went to work lining up a team of upvoters from different IP addresses. Following Alex’s strategy, we wanted to get as many upvotes as we could, as quickly as possible. That's pretty scummy. > Less than ten minutes after executing on our bulletproof strategy, our post was nowhere to be found. Good. If you're going to try to game the system, you deserve to get your posts deleted. Also, this: > And interestingly, he changed the headline from "7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year," to "Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year". > Shorter, simpler, more direct. Flies in the face of the copywriting wisdom I had been reading about specificity and numbered lists. And yet, it worked! is a really revealing thing to say. It means that your plans to make the front page somehow didn't include reading the submission guidelines [1]: > If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." 1: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html