I won't pretend there aren't voting rings but they're not limited to the "valley in group" at all. We see people across the world trying to game the site, as people do on Hacker News, reddit, and other crowd-curation sites. As I mentioned earlier on this HN thread, we have systems that help combat these rings and in part thank to YC/HN's guidance, we'll improve this.
I also want to point out just a few examples of products that reached the top of the day's board from non-valley, "famous" startup people. E.g.
- Notifyr (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/notifyr) was made by a 17 year old in the Netherlands. It's the 5th most upvoted product right now
- Instanerd (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/instanerd) was made by Alex in Skopje, Macedonia as a small side project. It received over 160 upvotes and ~5x the number of comments than the average submission.
- Pie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/pie) is a team collaboration app by startup in Sigapore. It too hit the top of the board.
Of course, not everyone will agree with what's most upvoted and an upvote really is just a measure of interest, not a review.
I'm not implying of anything shady. I'm just saying that kinda stuff is really annoying for the average joe.
Do you think involvement with YC will accelerate that step and is it still a (very?) high priority--I say "very" because the fact that it seems to be an exclusive list that's not open seems to be one of the biggest criticisms.
That it's managed to get so much traffic and now seed funding says a lot about how the Valley works, and probably not in a good way. It's literally a platform for someone's friends to upvote each other - "conflict of interest for YC" doesn't even scratch the surface.
I do think the platform has value, but only insofar as that it helps those who are playing the VC game by showing them what a certain "in crowd" thinks is cool.