One upvote is not enough to get to the front page, so I'm not exactly sure what you're expecting, nor how the current situation differs from your expectation. Perhaps you could be a little clearer and say exactly what you're doing, exactly what you expect, and specifically how these things are different from each other.

Certainly, as someone else has commented[0], clicking the up arrow does not always change the score you see until you refresh the page. Also, as someone else has commented[1], the system has "voting ring" detection systems, and sometimes it thinks votes are part of a voting ring and then doesn't count the vote at all, and might even apply a penalty to the item's ranking.

So you need to be more specific. Also, you can ask about specific incongruities by emailing hn@ycominator.com.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747941

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747977

>One upvote is not enough to get to the front page

Oh! of course. The perception that stories languish on the "new" page inspite of having received upvotes (not mine) was a qualitative observation rather than a quantitative one. May be the compete pool itself has grown larger and it needs more votes to get promoted.

What I am talking about here is that even after I have upvoted a story and refreshed the page after 15 minutes it still does not show the upvote.

Question of voting ring does not arise, the very thought is quite preposterous ! :) Unless it has a tendency to trigger false positives. If there was indeed such a tendency, I think that would have come to light sooner.

The delay in seeing your votes show up on submissions can be explained by some combination of the following two issues:

The first issue for you to consider is the continuous system load caused by immediately counting every single vote and/or flag on submissions. It makes a lot of sense to batch the tallying operations and only update every "N" minutes to reduce load. Additionally, since an up-vote on a submission will mark it so it's stored in your "saved stories" list, the overhead of immediate processing is most likely larger than most imagine. Also, there's the overhead and delays of multiple types of caching being employed. As always, it's a huge balancing act.

The second issue is how ring-voting, ring-flagging, and even ring-rating are constantly occurring since combating the problem is exceedingly difficult, and the rewards for successful abusive manipulation can be substantial. Abusive manipulation from multiple people/accounts is even more difficult to solve on any system designed to produce collaborative curation. Generally speaking, HN is collaborative curation, but attempts are made to prevent abusive manipulation.

When I visit the new page and upvote, it doesn't increment either even after upvoting then refreshing the page. But did it always do that? I don't think so - I think that, in the past, it would have incremented even without a refresh.

I wish we could view the new page at the same time and then both could upvote the same story to see what happens. It could be that all stories on new are shown with a score of "1" yet they really have a score of "0". If that was the case, the first vote just moves it from a fake "1" to an actual "1".

Are you trying to do a voting ring and get your content to the front page? Maybe your accounts are flagged to be in a voting ring?

You probably need to refresh to pick up the new vote count. That's how it works for me (I just upvoted this post). At first it stayed on 1, on the refresh it was 2.