[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.