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This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

Please don't ring-vote posts, though. It's against the rules, makes it likely that your post won't be seen (I only caught this one by accident), and will eventually get your account dinged.

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What does it mean to "ring-vote" posts?

A voting ring is a group of people that all upvote each other's posts. But most of the time, it lacks that level of organization -- usually, ring-voting just refers to having all your friends upvote your post for you.

One really easy way to trip HN's voting ring detector is to send your voters a direct link. However, in my experience, this acts less to detect voting rings than to weed out HN newbies. All my friends just post on facebook with something along the lines of "go search the New page for <x> and upvote, please!"

Ah, so are you (and is @dang) saying that tweeting or facebooking a link is Ring Voting? I didn't ask for upvotes, I apologize if this was a violation of netiquette. Thanks for explaining this!

I can't speak for dang, but if you didn't ask for votes, I don't think you violated netiquette at all.

So now instead of sending my friends a URL I have to give them vague instructions about where to find the content?

Welcome to Web 3.0!

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