Comment by borski
10 years ago
That's not really relevant; I don't think it's our job, or anyone else's, to police the internet for 'vote brigading.' In this case, it was never against the stated rules.
10 years ago
That's not really relevant; I don't think it's our job, or anyone else's, to police the internet for 'vote brigading.' In this case, it was never against the stated rules.
It's definitely against HN's rules and is in the FAQ:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
That specifically refers to submitted stories.
I think it is dodgy to have an online election, and then disqualify participants for mentioning it to people who might want to vote for them.
I can't reply to dan's reply to this, for some reason, but regarding "I don't see a distinction there. It refers to submissions, and Apply HN posts were submissions, a.k.a. stories in HN's sense (posts that aren't comments).", well, it also says that users should vote for "a story" because it's "intellectually interesting", which is not a rationale (or in the case of "story" a referring term) that seems to make much sense in the present case. So it makes a lot of sense, I think, to construe it as referring to submissions in the narrower sense.
Regardless, the tweets in question were around a long time before Pinboard was disqualified without expectation. The first one certainly predates kevin's phone call, for instance.
(And of course one of the tweets in question was contained a link to the general poll, which was not a submission of Maciej's, and the other, technically, was a link to all the Apply HN posts, not to his.)
I don't see a distinction there. It refers to submissions, and Apply HN posts were submissions, a.k.a. stories in HN's sense (posts that aren't comments).
Certainly it never crossed my mind that the rules about voting rings would be any different than with regular posts. HN users are passionately opposed to the voting system getting gamed; we'd have been skinned alive if we allowed it. But tptacek makes a good point about that not being obvious to everybody.
9 replies →
Yup! And I don't intend to ever do that.
But that says nothing about the Apply HN situation. That's new, had a different set of rules (hell, you wrote a polling solution), and the regular guidelines didn't necessarily apply. That they did should have been made clear.
Again, nothing against it this time, since it's all up to you guys - just feedback for the next time.
Why is the FAQ not linked within the Guidelines page (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? To me, that is a guideline... you wouldn't look at the FAQ before posting something.