It's worth mentioning that there are two classes of this game:<p>1) I get 47 of my closest friends to mindlessly vote it up in some kind of vote exchange black market.<p>2) I get one or perhaps two close friends who have read the submission and genuinely like it to vote up so that my submission has a chance to stand on its own merit.<p>#1 is bad, and makes HN cheap. #2 though is a rational response to a broken system.<p>I think the right approach to #1 is to algorithmically detect and squash it. The right approach to #2 is to figure out why it's even necessary to do that, and change the system such that it's no longer necessary at all.
The interesting thing here is not how many people do this but how many of the links that get posted were upvoted by 'friends'. Even if it is only a few people doing it if they are heavy submitters it could materially alter the situation.<p>And if they're 'critical' upvotes I wouldn't have much of a problem with it but if they are upvotes <i>just</i> because your friend wrote whatever then that's really the 'road to digg'.<p>From my own research I can see we are still quite a few 'yes' votes short.
No, but I've been asked to upvote several times. I usually do because they're good stories and people know to only ask me such things if their stuff is actually any good, but I don't always follow through.<p>That out of the way, it'd be cool if there were a way to more easily track "good" new submissions. I browse the /new page perhaps once or twice a day (at most) so a lot of good stuff is going to have passed me by. Being able to see new stuff from a "favorite" set of users would be kinda cool (or even the top 100) but might break the dynamic of the site..?
I do it when I think the post is of sufficient quality. That extra vote within 5 minutes of posing it usually bumps it to the front page where it actually stands a fair chance of getting noticed.
We had the same discussion a few weeks ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206</a>