It's against HN's rules to have promotional upvotes and/or comments in the threads—especially comments. I suppose your friends were just trying to help you out, but HN users are sensitive to this and consider it spamming. They're not exactly wrong, because the upvotes and comments we're talking about were not organic. We want genuine, curious conversation here, and this is not that.

This in both the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).