[wwalser]

I don't disagree with your assertions and in fact I think you're pointing out something that's important for people to generally understand. However, It's important to understand that this is more of a _rule_ than an exception. Very similar accusations could be leveled against most anything that's A) popular but not ubiquitous B) vote driven. Hacker News and Reddit have voting rings as well.

I'd go so far as to say that all niche markets have non-disclosed "syndicates" of sorts. Life and wealth seminars, professional conferences, information products people, church leaders, podcasts - all promote other people/products/things similar to themselves who also promote them.

It seem more important to understand this and to take it into consideration when looking at something like AngelList or PH. Advocating that these organizations work against the grain of how all niche markets work seems unlikely to be effective.

[jonathankoren]

It's not just voting rings on PH though. There's an clique of PH friends that skip the voting completely and go directly to the front page. (See previous HN discussion [0]) PH even admitted that this is the case, and then defended it with the standard Silicon Valley "meritocracy" bullshit that there's just no smarter and better people than my friends and investors, so it's cool.

That's just good ol boy bullshit. After I read about that, it became dead to me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10739875

[wwalser]

Again I don't disagree. I acknowledge the very likely truth in the claims. I get why it pisses people off. I'm a founder, I want distribution as much as the next person and being bootstrapped I know it's less likely for me than for someone who sold 20% of their company to someone with connections. Those facts just doesn't disqualify PH as a source of interesting things to look at for me. For clarity though I've spend a grand total of like 4 hours on PH in my life[0], I just don't have that much time to waste.

HN has super voters. There's also a trait that your account can be tagged with which makes content that you share less likely to get to the front page (all votes on your content count as some percentage of a "real" vote). That attribute is usually added to non-insiders whose content often makes it to the front page.

I don't think they do it out of malice. They are design decisions in service of amplifying/dampening some desirable/undesirable effect. It doesn't make the creators evil, it just means that they have goals, metrics or influences other than the purity of their voting mechanisms. Community sites are super fucking hard and the people who have built successful ones have my respect.

0. https://twitter.com/wewals/status/798759401892941826

[rl3]

>There's also a trait that your account can be tagged with which makes content that you share less likely to get to the front page (all votes on your content count as some percentage of a "real" vote). That attribute is usually added to non-insiders whose content often makes it to the front page.

I've noticed for a while now that I'll only receive a fraction of total points for a submission, perhaps 50-60% of the submission's displayed upvotes.

[visakanv]

> I'd go so far as to say that all niche markets have non-disclosed "syndicates" of sorts.

I think this might be human nature. My wife told me about the group behavior of a Facebook group she belongs to (women's fitness Facebook group), and how over time some of the women become mini-celebrities – everytime they post anything, they get all the Likes and comments. Human networks just seem to naturally coalesce this way, with power law distributions.