[drats]

There isn't a 37 signals "voting ring" but pretty much we see about a blog per week from them of extremely low/general quality. Often they are of a lifestyle/why we didn't go big and why we are actually better than all the big IPOs changing the world nature. I mean this post boils down to "I love my company (that I own, not that I work for)". I think even if PG posted a blog so vapid, "I love Ycombinator, I can picture working here for years", even he would get a bit of fire. I certainly hope we aren't going to be seeing these vapid posts for a decade or more from 37S. You could randomly select a book from the self-help or business section of a bookstore, select a random page, and have a good chance of getting something more insightful than a standard weekly 37s post.

I seriously have nothing against them, I wish them more success even: just not success getting to the front page here because frankly they don't talk about interesting algorithms, technologies or business strategies. They are incredibly boring. No mobile, no Google glasses, no new computer game, no crafty actionable patio11 strategy, no raspberry pi hack, no programming language hack, no excellent presentation, no struggling story of success, no rejection and comeback, no scaling of servers, no clever command lines, no new SSH shell, no browser plugin, no investment philosophy, just "I love my business".

75% of their posts are simply not HN-worthy and there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this. Please just subscribe to their twitter or RSS because their weekly show here is frankly tragic and they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.

Edit. Just to note I own a DHH book, so I will pay for the writing of this guy when it's actually worth it. I'm just saying this blog stuff isn't even worth free.

[rednukleus]

> there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this.

Depends on how you define voting ring. It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, and these people just vote it up regardless of content.

> they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.

Most of it is recycled. They wrote some blog posts, turned it into a book, and now they are recycling the book back into blog posts. As you say it's almost always short and low quality, so it probably takes very little of their time.

It's very clever marketing on their point, and there is very little that can be done about it, because there is no downvote on submissions, and 37signals is not likely to get blocked from the site.

[destraynor]

Meh. I'm cynical of the voting ring algorithm.

I used to tweet when I wrote a new post on the Intercom blog but too many of my followers used to +1 the post and now it seems we're in some way blacklisted on HN.

Example: http://blog.intercom.io/the-future-of-email-products/ this post when pretty much viral everywhere else, ~100K page views, submitted to HN lots of times by lots of people and I'm sure most of you guys have read it, but never gets anywhere. Curious.

[guelo]

It is an interesting thought about the voting ring because 37S so consistently gets onto the front page. Yet, I've seen big tech news stories that make headlines across the web somehow slip by the 'new' page on HN and then have a hard time getting on the front page. But as far as I can tell you only really need a handful of votes in the 'new' section to push a story onto the front page where it gets more of a chance to sink or swim. I assume pg does have some anti-vote ring countermeasures, and knowing of pg's love of bayesian algos I assume they are smart and adaptive, it would be fascinating to know how it works.

[Sujan]

> It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, [...]

Sure, it's called "RSS". *scnr

[michaelkscott]

You know the authors never submit the blog posts to HN, right? It's other HN members who are a fan of 37 Signals who submit their blog posts to HN.

So, are you complaining at 37 Signals for writing on their own blog, or at HN members for submitting something they thought was interesting?

Also take note that the term "HN-worthy" is highly subjective. Submissions make it to the front page of HN not because they're HN-worthy but because many people vote them up.

[larrys]

"So, are you complaining "

There is no transparency as far as how something makes it to the first page or it's position on that page.

[lovskogen]

To be cynical: they're soon launching a new product. As of late, they've ramped up the blog from almost standing still.