> there isn't a voting ring but there is probably a bunch of social contacts who are up voting this.
Depends on how you define voting ring. It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, and these people just vote it up regardless of content.
> they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.
Most of it is recycled. They wrote some blog posts, turned it into a book, and now they are recycling the book back into blog posts. As you say it's almost always short and low quality, so it probably takes very little of their time.
It's very clever marketing on their point, and there is very little that can be done about it, because there is no downvote on submissions, and 37signals is not likely to get blocked from the site.
I used to tweet when I wrote a new post on the Intercom blog but too many of my followers used to +1 the post and now it seems we're in some way blacklisted on HN.
Example: http://blog.intercom.io/the-future-of-email-products/ this post when pretty much viral everywhere else, ~100K page views, submitted to HN lots of times by lots of people and I'm sure most of you guys have read it, but never gets anywhere. Curious.
It is an interesting thought about the voting ring because 37S so consistently gets onto the front page. Yet, I've seen big tech news stories that make headlines across the web somehow slip by the 'new' page on HN and then have a hard time getting on the front page. But as far as I can tell you only really need a handful of votes in the 'new' section to push a story onto the front page where it gets more of a chance to sink or swim. I assume pg does have some anti-vote ring countermeasures, and knowing of pg's love of bayesian algos I assume they are smart and adaptive, it would be fascinating to know how it works.
Depends on how you define voting ring. It wouldn't surprise me if they let a load of people know every time something is posted, and these people just vote it up regardless of content.
> they should cut down to 1/4th as much and spend more time with their family.
Most of it is recycled. They wrote some blog posts, turned it into a book, and now they are recycling the book back into blog posts. As you say it's almost always short and low quality, so it probably takes very little of their time.
It's very clever marketing on their point, and there is very little that can be done about it, because there is no downvote on submissions, and 37signals is not likely to get blocked from the site.