I'm not saying the voting ring problem doesn't exist, but that the question of "is this ethical" is one that is more difficult to answer than this algorithm. I think the developers who ran this collusion algorithm must agree with this to some extent, otherwise there would be no reason to pseudo-anonymize the results.
To give an example. If I were to create fake accounts and then do some type of automated up-voting system for my own posts; in my mind that is clearly unethical behavior.
If I announce to my existing customers that I have posted something and they go of their free accord and up-vote this is clearly ethical behavior.
If I ask my existing customer/friends/family to go up-vote me I believe this falls into a grayer area, but I would personally say this too is unethical.
Ok but why is ethics the most important consideration here? The consideration for the community is that the quality of the links is good and whether ethical or not, posting everything publicly and having THE SAME people be in the first 10 upvotes means there is a system that takes quality of the article into account less than the identity of the submitter, and it's been doing this over and over.
So ethics may be not the important question here, for the community.
So I think there are (at least) a couple of separate issues here.
1) Is Something ethical marketing tactics.
This is mostly what I was trying to address. If something is the result of ethical marketing then I'm of the opinion, "We'll allow it!" The reason for this being that "the better product" will fail if marketing is poor; and so people are typically better off going with an inferior product that survives.
2) Is Product Hunt allowing/perpetuating voter rings?
I think this goes to your issue of, "THE SAME people be in the first 10 upvotes". Honestly I'm not sure, but I do think Product Hunt's model is flawed. I think this message on Product Hunt alone gives some indication to the problem,
"Product Hunt is a community of product enthusiasts. Submissions are accepted by our most active members, specifically those that have been invited by others in the community."
It is an invite only, non open community. So in a certain sense the entire site is one giant voter ring; we all can vote, but we can't submit. So all voters are limited to voting on products from those deemed worthy by Product Hunt of posting in the first place.
If we were to contrast this with Eduhunt.co (same as Product Hunt, but targets only educational products) it is an open community that allows anyone that registers to post.
