Right. An extra 1 or 2 points soon after submission gets you onto the front page, even if only briefly. That's enough to get your post in front of a lot of eyeballs and then it can be judged on its own merits. Whereas if you don't get those critical early votes, you're stuck on the new page in front of just a small handful of eyeballs, and you're "judged" more by randomness than by merit.
1 or 2 extra points within the first few seconds of a posts existence makes it shoot to the top 5 at least. I think the algorithm could do with some modification for that sort of case.
The justification is that the new page moves too fast. We like to think that merit matters, but it's random and arbitrary whether or not something moves off of the new page with that initial vote or two.
I openly admit to having previously colluded with nickb to do this for an occasional story. Just a few submissions in my years here. There is no front page sculpting among the top users here like on Digg. Edw and I actually talked about this in a mixergy interview we did with Andrew Warner.
Still, if there is something I really, really want to give a chance at getting on the front page, I will not feel bad about making sure it gets 2 or 3 points in the first couple minutes. 4 points would be too many. If it doesn't get any more upvotes, it will fall away quickly.
Since nickb and I upvoted stories that we felt were on-topic and deserving of being on the front page, where is the moral problem? And, if it is decided this is bad, how can it be stopped? Should you really only be able to upvote a friend's story if you innocently see it on the new page? Most people don't browse the new page, giving a small minority of users the power to choose what is seen by everyone else.
The supposed democracy of the new page is not something wonderful with this naive integrity we must maintain. It's a flawed system we have to work with. Asking friends to vote for your stories is a slippery slope, but when they are stories they would have upvoted anyways, there is no moral dilemna. It's a long slope from nickb and I colluding once every 6 months and people paying me hundreds of dollars to put their acai berry affiliate marketing site on the front page.
Timing is everyhing, and apparently on HN by being able to influence the timing of the first few votes you get a very large amount of control over what makes it and what does not.
The end result is that those that play by the rules don't stand a chance versus those that cheat, just like on digg.
Friend upvoting is not recommended, but isn't outright banned. I'm not sure that there can be a self-consistent guideline that bans asking friends for upvotes. We can certainly discourage it though.
I think you should credit the community with more integrity. I don't think anyone here would blindly upvote a submission if asked to, without first checking if the submission was in fact something they'd upvote anyway if they knew about it.
Also for me, the ASK HN: submissions are the most interesting. Often they get overlooked and buried. It'd be nice to have a separate page for ASK HN submissions IMHO.
Anything to get more "ASK HN:" and less "ZOMG! Tablet! It's a tablet PC or at least a rumor about one!"
Is asking friends to flag a submission 'wrong' also?
> I don't think anyone here would blindly upvote a submission if asked to
I wished that were true.
> Also for me, the ASK HN: submissions are the most interesting. Often they get overlooked and buried. It'd be nice to have a separate page for ASK HN submissions IMHO.
From personal experience of having many times asked other HNers to have a look to a story I submitted (often not one from my blog, but simply a story I felt deserved some attention), it is true.
If it makes it that high it won't be there for more than a minute or two anyways. However I agree that the algorithm is probably weighted too extremely for upvotes during the first minute or two of a story's existence.
