[nick-garfield]

I'm sure you're right that people occasionally leverage a friend network to upvote content to the front-page. I get the sense this happens a lot on Product Hunt.

But I know for a fact this isn't the _only_ way to reach the front-page of HN because I didn't ask anyone to upvote this post. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[paulgb]

For what it's worth, Ask and Show posts are less likely to fall into the abyss than regular posts because they both have their own front pages where the threshold is lower than the main FP. So they have a longer exposure time to gain the upvotes to make it to the FP.