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Wouldn't this count as a voting ring?

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.

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.

Exactly...

What next? Send out internal emails saying "Hey, the company has just posted a new blog, but you don't need the actual link, instead just use the HackerNews one, or maybe this Reddit one..."

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