I don't know what's "fair" or "unfair" in this context, but suggesting that Sam's comment is "disingenuous" is unproductive, because the voting ring detector isn't going anywhere. It's one of those things where most of us only see the occasional annoying side effect, but we don't notice the avalanche of crap that it's keeping off the front page.

You can probably safely assume that the decision to keep aggressively penalizing voting rings (and things that to the detector look like rings) is made and isn't changing.

With that in mind, read Sam's comment as "here's how not to get stung by the detector", not as an appeal to change your behavior for his sake. He's trying to help.

YC companies complain the most often because they trigger the voting ring when they ask their batchmates to votes them up :)

As a counter argument, I haven't seen any ycombinator company NOT make it on the front page. I am not saying this is a collusion or anything but wanted to point out that there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works. They would send a message like "Please go to HN and look for such and such title and vote it up. I can't post the link because of voting ring algorithm". And I see these people always show up on the front page. When this is the reality, how can one NOT do this? The people who try to play fair are the ones who will lose. I agree with you that it's not good to ask for upvotes but people who already know how it works will keep doing it, and the people who don't will just lose like they always have. Also I wonder what you do with those YC company guys who complain about getting detected as voting ring. Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance? If you are going to ask people to cooperate, I think it's crucial to have some transparency. Otherwise, no matter what you ask, nothing will change.

As a person who discovers lots of cool projects through showHN posts, I hope you could come up with a solution for this, really.

I realize you may discount this, coming from HN staff, but I'd like to try to ease your worries a little.

> there are people with knowledge who do this all the time and can get away with it because they know how it works.

I believe you that people say they know, but unless I'm extremely mistaken, most really don't. We see evidence all the time of people trying (but failing) to sneak around HN's anti-ring systems. That's not to say some don't succeed. Some probably do. I'd like very much to get better at catching them.

> And I see these people always show up on the front page.

When you see that, we'd like to know about it. There is a lot that we can (and will) do to investigate those cases. Don't forget that even when the ring detector misses something, there's still a lot of data we can look at if we know to. So please, everyone, email hn@ycombinator.com when someone is gaming HN.

Our goal is to have the best stories on the front page [1]. We don't all agree about what the best stories are, but I think we can agree that they're usually not ones that are only here because someone is promoting something. When we say we want people to vote for things they're interested in, that's not the kind of interest we're talking about.

> Do you just let their posts stay buried or do you give them a second chance?

Good question. We occasionally override the ring penalty when a story has clear merit for HN. (I've commented to that effect in perhaps a dozen of those threads.) But that goes for any story, not just a YC co's. And we're pretty stingy about it.

[1] That's also, by the way, our primary idea of how HN as a forum can help YC's business interests. If HN has the best quality content, the best quality people will want to be here, and some of them will start startups that YC funds. I'm not saying we do have the best quality content—there's a lot to be desired. I'm saying that this is HN's global optimum and we're not interested in trading that away for something less.

Fair enough, that's good to know :)

Other than "jobs" we get no help promoting content.

I actually think being a YC company can hurt you because all your YC buddies vote for you and then it appears that your cohort is a voting ring. I actually have to tell people NOT to vote for my posts sometimes, lest I trigger the HN Gods' wrath.

Do you really believe it's a disadvantage?

I guess I wouldn't call it a disadvantage because saying "boo hoo, my friend and I from YC up vote ourselves too much and we get hit by the voting ring detector" is obliviousness by omission. I assume my links do well on HN because I went through YC and have written about going through YC.

My real point is to highlight: (1) There is no advantage on HN to going through YC. The only changes are (a) You have access to the part of the site that lets you book office hours (b) You can see other YC users and (c) You can post jobs. I know of no other benefit. My co-founders can't, for example, down vote comments because they don't have the karma. (2) A significant percentage of active users are YC alums, YC alums that know me, or people who know me personally, so once something I post hits the front page I ask my co-workers and my friends to NOT up vote me. I do that because historically my items have gotten thrown off the home page and I write blog posts so people will read the posts.

> From what I've heard, they get a lot of help to promote content.

They don't from us (the people running HN). The only help HN gives YC cos are (a) being able to post job ads and (b) YC founders' names appear in orange to other YC founders.

YC startups routinely get hit hard by HN's ring detector.

Perhaps promoted content should be labelled as such, eg an orange 1px border around the listing. If adding a new story in to the mix that could have a green 1px border to highlight it was out of normal flow too.

Job listings are the only promoted content. They're distinguished by the lack of vote arrows.

So contrary to the discussion YC companies don't get any preferential treatment on HN?

To the extent we're able to be objective, we try to be. YC founders and companies get their titles edited and suffer the same penalties as everyone else. The only advantage YC founders and companies might have is the ability to recognize each other from the orange names.

Just everyone in the office independently voting on something can trigger it, which is unfortunate since it was not even planned.

I think at this point, they have a network large enough to kick off the newest page to the front page pretty quickly.