It's not a bug. The sw detected that it was your partner, basically. I don't want to disclose the exact algorithm (it changes anyway), but in order to protect against spam and voting rings, some votes don't affect scores, and others affect scores but not rankings.
Oh, ok - wow. But how about the front page issue? Ah, maybe it's because 1 upvote was my wife who just joined (daniela) and the other was a friend who just joined but plays a role in the startup, (Frode Odegard.)?
Is it also a factor that streamfocus is related to my id, and I posted it rather than someone else - or would you have to shoot me if you answer this one? (Thanks for the clarification, btw)
I was thinking about the partner identification algorithm you have, thinking it must be pretty clever, and then I realized: the system probably just does a check into the contact database showing that my partner and I both signed up under 1 company for Startup school. It was a bit baffling how you could pull it off without that as my partner very rarely posts here so there is not much data to build from. Oh, I see: we both have streamfocus.com in our descriptions.
My YC application partner's votes also doesn't count for my submitted stories.
pg: Let's say I run Tor and sign up for 25 new accounts over the course of a couple days. I vote for random stories with each account over the course of a week or two. I make two or three comments with each account agreeing with the previous post. I submit the story I want to game onto the front page and then vote up with all of my dummy accounts.
Will these votes count?
Is there a way of preventing a determined individual with an army of pseudo-accounts from gaming social news sites?
The way I advise founders to deal with abuse is to rule out the obvious stuff from the start (e.g. don't give out the root password), and deal with the subtle stuff as you become more popular. Reddit did that, and it seems to have worked fine. Reddit is now big enough that a lot of people try to game their way onto the frontpage, but Steve & Co still seem to have the upper hand.
