[dang]

Why do you say these things? I'd be fascinated to know.

Almost everything here is wrong. HN's anti-abuse software isn't perfect, but if you ask friends to upvote your article, there's a high chance it won't help and you'll get your (and their) accounts penalized in the process. We actually go through the penalized posts looking for things to rescue because people tank their own good work in this way so reliably.

The dupe detector does not work the way you described.

If you post something super interesting that doesn't get attention, you (or anyone) can always email us at [e-mail] and we might put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), in which case it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

[dheera]

Thanks! This is helpful to know.

I've seen lots of friends (including dozens of YC founders) ask for upvotes, usually via FB in ways that wouldn't necessarily constitute a ring (e.g. asking strangers in founder-friendly facebook groups), and they're usually of things worthy of publicity, and they do make it to the front page pretty quickly after the upvote requests.

I've also seen a lot of instances where posting once didn't do anything, and then posting a second time with an equivalent but different URL + asking a few friends to help upvote made it to the front page pretty quickly.

For example, I posted https://github.com/dheera/rosshow on 2019-Mar-27 -- no dice.

Then posted it again with a "www.", i.e. https://www.github.com/dheera/rosshow -- then asked a couple friends to upvote -- and then BAM front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19519165).

So the only thing I did differently between trial A and B was asked people to upvote, and trial B succeeded.

[dang]

Assuming I'm reading the data correctly, your friends' votes were rejected by HN's software on that second submission. Randomness is the biggest factor on /newest, which is why we allow a small number of reposts to begin with: to give good submissions multiple cracks at the bat.

[dheera]

Thanks, helpful to know! I would have thought reposts would be penalized. Is there anyway to potentially mitigate the randomness factor though? For example by measuring things like impression time, bounce rate, and so on.