It always surprises me when people get bent out of shape when they learn that blogs and forums are rigged to favor a certain group of people. There's A LOT of money to be had and if you think places like Product Hunt, Reddit, HN, etc. aren't all being rigged in some way, you're naive.
There are ways to optimize submissions to Reddit/Hacker News for upvotes, yes. (and I've done a lot of research on both services.) However, I would say that neither is rigged; that is, moderators don't control what is seen on the front page. (Although in the case of HN, moderators have bumped up good posts which have not been upvoted, which is a positive intervention)
Product Hunt, as noticed in the article, requires shennanigans to be successful. The real problem here is that PH presents itself as a meritocracy when it really isn't, and it has mislead naive entrepreneurs into thinking a given product is "good" when it truly isn't.
You can only vouch once something has become flagged, but then it works against the flags. (and if only a few users have flagged a post, it is likely to become unflagged by that)
The rigging that goes on in Reddit isn't done by the Reddit staff and their friends is the major difference.
Reddit is reasonably resistant to that sort of thing by its userbase as well. Reddit is not resistant to marketers with budgets who can produce quality content masquerading as users. And tbh, such content creation/curation by such people is beneficial to the community precisely because it contains a certain level of quality.
The only place I've found that not to be true is in smaller subreddits where a single digit number of votes is enough to push content up.
Hacker News does function similar to PH tho but [unlike PH] its both open and obvious. [i.e. Everyone knows who the list of YC companies are]
> Hacker News does function similar to PH tho but [unlike PH] its both open and obvious. [i.e. Everyone knows who the list of YC companies are]
Exactly. YC doesn't even attempt to hide their favoritism of their own companies on HN (an obvious example is only letting YC companies post job ads). My comment was more about understanding that favoritism and rigged systems are real, not that they are right or wrong.
HN does favor YC startups by letting them post job ads, and YC alums by coloring their usernames. It's important to realize, though, that those two things are all the special treatment YC companies get on HN.
Some other things people sometimes think we do, like promote or penalize stories because they're YC-related, we consciously err on the side of not doing. That's the #1 rule of HN moderation and was literally the first thing pg taught me about it.
