"With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious."
This article makes a BIG assumption about what constitutes a good story and about how HN users actually use the upvote feature. The least subjective way I could define a good story on Hacker News is by basing it on the only visible metric - number of upvotes. This doesn't mean I agree that the article is good from a subjective perspective.
Upvotes could be given for lots of reasons and the higher number of votes could just be because the article is about a subject that more people take an interest in (you also have to take an increase in casual visitors into account). An article about a niche subject, however "good" that article or product is, is less likely to get a higher number of upvotes because less people are interested in it. And posters need to ask themselves if their article or product really is of interest. Posters would also need to put effort into promoting their article elsewhere too (twitter, reddit, other social) and not just expect results from HN.
This article makes a BIG assumption about what constitutes a good story and about how HN users actually use the upvote feature. The least subjective way I could define a good story on Hacker News is by basing it on the only visible metric - number of upvotes. This doesn't mean I agree that the article is good from a subjective perspective.
Upvotes could be given for lots of reasons and the higher number of votes could just be because the article is about a subject that more people take an interest in (you also have to take an increase in casual visitors into account). An article about a niche subject, however "good" that article or product is, is less likely to get a higher number of upvotes because less people are interested in it. And posters need to ask themselves if their article or product really is of interest. Posters would also need to put effort into promoting their article elsewhere too (twitter, reddit, other social) and not just expect results from HN.