From the D Blog: A Pattern for Head-mutable Structures

[Mike Parker]

On Saturday, 27 June 2020 at 03:27:14 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 14:02:14 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> But if you do want to vote, I'd like your vote to count.
>
> I've seen no evidence that this strategy actually works. 
> Appears totally random if a D post sticks around or not. And in 
> a great many of these posts, people complain that they can't 
> find the post at all which definitely doesn't help anything.

I haven't seen anyone complaining they can't find the posts, just 
that I don't provide the links.

It's three steps (two on a 4k monitor):

1. Go to https://news.ycombinator.com
2. Hit the 'End' key to get to the search box at the bottom of 
the page
3. Enter all or part of the blog post title in the search box

After that, it's in the browser history. I have never not been 
able to find the post doing this.

>
> Are you sure it is worth it?

Like I said above, there are other factors that determine a 
post's success on HN and it's always hit or miss. So far, I 
haven't been able to turn up any foolproof advice. But those who 
have attempted to crack the secret all say that if people are 
following direct links, it will definitely hinder the post's 
performance and a miss is pretty much guaranteed. The FAQ says 
clearly:

"Can I ask people to upvote my submission?

No. Users should vote for a story because they personally find it 
intellectually interesting, not because someone has content to 
promote.

HN's software penalizes submissions, accounts, and sites that 
break this rule, so please don't."

Obviously, HN isn't going to scrape referring sites to check for 
people explicitly asking for upvotes. We know for certain that 
direct links disqualify upvotes, there's evidence to suggest that 
they account for indirect hits to a post from direct links to 
other parts of the site, and I can't find any information on if 
any of this is factored into the ranking algorithm in another way.

So yes, if people from this community want to monitor the 
comments on a HN site, I think it's worth it to ask them to take 
a couple of extra steps to do so in the interest of avoiding a 
negative impact on the post's ranking. If the post turns out to 
be a miss, it wasn't because of anything we did. If we do get 
lucky and hit the front page, then we've got more eyes on the 
post, our community members have more opportunity to share their 
experience, and we get (hopefully) a good PR day for D.