This kind of behavior is exactly what made Digg the useless oligarchy of content promotion that it is.
I think asking other people to vote your favored story to the front page is really an exercise in egotism, and it kinda misses the point. If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.
If other people aren't interested, why would one force it to the front page? For what? So that people can see it and skip over it and not discuss it and wish something more interesting were on the front page?
I hope it doesn't come to the same measures that Digg tried (and mostly failed) to implement, with algorithmic detection of rigged voting and banning of people doing scripted submissions and votes.
Hang on, though. What if I don't even have to ask?
I know that I tend to upvote people more often who I know (even without them asking). Is that bad / immoral?
If you say yes, then it's very important to come up with an answer for "what's an upvote supposed to mean?" If you don't think I should be allowed to upvote people because I know them, you can no longer say that the rule is "I was interested in this story" but instead "I think the HN community would be interested in this story".
But that's asking for trouble, because everybody has their own crazy views on what HN should be (see the periodic threads on how HN is offtopic, or too big, or not as cool as it used to be).
This sort of brings up an interesting idea: perhaps anonymous story posting is something to consider? I have no problem voting comments up based on the strength/personality of the commenter, past discourse colors current interpretation of the comment. However with stories, maybe upvoting on a person's character is not so wanted/warranted?
Edit: The more I think on this, the less I'm sure it would fix anything -- those who want their story upvoted because it is to their own site would not care about credit. Also it opens up various gaming opportunities not previously present.
That doesn't always hold. If a submission on security came and tptacek commented, I'd probably upvote his comment knowing that he's pretty damn well versed in that field.
The guidelines don't address upvotes in particular but if we are to assume that on-topic generally equals upvote then I think the guidelines spell it out well. I don't see an "I" in there anywhere or reference to submitter.
That doesn't really solve the problem of rigged up-voting (it does solve the problem of blind up-voting of celebrity submissions).
I think removing permalinks from new submissions could help - the only way you could upvote new submissions would be to have them organically show up on your list. Still could be gamed though.
Might be too much trouble for what it's worth, though. It turns into a cat-and-mouse game.
> If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.
>
> If other people aren't interested
Just a point of information: this is basically the "efficient market hypothesis" in another form.
I agree that the market is more efficient than any other alternative, but I do not think that the market is perfect, or that HN upvotes/downvotes are perfect.
In general, markets are better the more liquid they are, and the more people are involved.
I think that NEW topics submitted to HN are viewed by very few people, and the result from the first few people upvoting a new topic can be HUGE, in that there's a feedback effect - they are exposed to new viewers the higher they rise.
It would be quite interesting to do an A/B test at HN, where some topic that is of middlin' interest is introduced: half the viewers seen version A of HN where the topic is introduced at a karma of 1, and the other half of the viewers see version B of HN where the same topic, under a different name, is introduced at a karma of 10.
If you ran this test 20 times I'd be amazed if the highest karma that the article got was similar even 70% of the time.
I think asking other people to vote your favored story to the front page is really an exercise in egotism, and it kinda misses the point. If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit.
If other people aren't interested, why would one force it to the front page? For what? So that people can see it and skip over it and not discuss it and wish something more interesting were on the front page?
I hope it doesn't come to the same measures that Digg tried (and mostly failed) to implement, with algorithmic detection of rigged voting and banning of people doing scripted submissions and votes.