I’m not in YC. I’ve been a happy user of RescueTime for almost ten years and they post interesting stats sometimes. It’s like how OKCupid articles get hundreds of upvotes, on a smaller scale.

It's less about the number of upvotes, but more about the rate. Not even product announcements from Apple/Google/Facebook et al. get tens of upvotes immediately after they are posted.

I honestly don’t know what’s normal. Back when I posted stuff that got upvotes, I’d expect to see 10 in the first hour on a successful submission. This was in 2011 so there may have more traffic now. Or it may have been brigades by fellow YC. Is that a normal pattern for workaday YC blogs? Some statistics would be helpful if anyone tracks vote rates by domain.

It's a YC company

We looked at the votes and they seem legit, even though they're statistically unlikely. But we'd appreciate it if you emailed instead of posting in the thread.

Alright, will follow up with an email.

The only person posting articles from this domain is OP. And OP seems to only post submissions to that domain - no other subs and no comments.

I think they call it brigading.

the article is kind of dumb but now I learned about "vote ring" and "brigading", stuff I never heard about.

So there's still value in crappy submissions...

More importantly, how little do you value your time to allow yourself to care for something like this? Better go answer some e-mails instead...

Maybe he works for an astroturfing company and he’s doing research...

Also, seems that most of the submissions from OP come from that website. Definitely fishy.