[Stal3r]

The actual answer is that insider networks are used to upvote stories. If you don't have a network of people you know on HN to upvote your article, it is very unlikely to ever get seen or noticed. This is a wart of HN that people don't want to talk about. Traffic isn't organic; it's a popularity contest at best. It would be naive to think that people wouldn't game a system that can drive so much traffic to any site.

[MattBearman]

HN does have a vote ring detector (or so I'm told) but I have a theory on how people avoid it:

You only need 4 or 5 quick votes to get to the front page, from there the submission will probably get organic traction.

So you need a network of 100 or more people who upvote each others submissions, but won't upvote if the submission already has enough votes to hit the front page. This way it's unlikely it will be the same subset of your network upvoting your story each time, making it much harder to catch.

Having said that, I have no such network, but have a few submissions reach the front page, one even spent a day at the top, so it is possible to get to the front page with out cheating

[pedalpete]

This is true, but shouldn't it be fairly easy to develop a system that looks for these groups of voters and discounts the total volume of their votes, rendering their gaming of the system as moot?

Also, seeing as discussion is so important to HN, I assume that active discussion is just as valuable as votes. I'll often comment on an article but forget to upvote it.

[jacalata]

Actually, hn has a "controversy" penalty that automatically downgrades posts with more comments than votes (kicks in at 40 comments) and pushes them down or off the front page.

[davidjnelson]

Doesn't this get you hellbanned?