[RyanZAG]

I guess it would, but I don't know how you'd get around it. If I were to post something on HN that was of interest to friend A, then sending him a link to the HN comments seems like the natural thing to do. Friend A would then probably upvote that article. So I've just created a mini-voting ring.

I'm pretty sure any company featured on HN (eg RethinkDB or any other) would send a link to the comments on HN if their product was being discussed here, and most employees would then upvote it.

It is a voting ring, but it's probably not done maliciously and it's just how HN works, I guess.

[coffeemug]

slava @ rethink here. Our team is really small. Even if everyone upvoted our stories (they don't -- many people don't even have HN accounts), it would only account for 5-10% of the upvotes; less for some of the more popular stories. The same is probably true for 42 floors. I find that their blog posts are quite good.

I suspect the "friendly upvote effect" has a lot to do with getting to the front page (which admittedly is important), but that doesn't make up for low quality content.