Drawing people's attention to a vote and promoting yourself isn't vote rigging in any sense. Vote rigging is tricking people to vote for you, or directly manipulating the voting mechanism.
Yes, that is true. But in an election the people that vote normally have some kind of interest in the outcome of the vote.
To ask a large number of outsiders who have otherwise no interest in the vote to come and vote for you to me seems to make the whole thing into a popularity contest, whoever has access to the largest communities will win the vote, regardless of the merit of the various candidates.
I don't think it is 'proper' to use the HN audience as a way to swing a vote one way or the other. But that's just my feeling, and judging by the moderation so far I'm in the minority with that ;).
I don't know, most talent contests with public voting have no impact on the voters either. They vote for whoever they liked best, or which act they liked best, or who had the hottest singer, or who shouted "vote me" the loudest.
I think it is relevant to HN because its an interesting article about a company founded by a regular HN member. Asking people to vote at the end of the article seems fairly natural to me.
At the bottom the writer asks HNers to vote for their submission.
"So this is my appeal to you, the Hacker News community. Please vote for us here (the vote closes on Friday). The public vote is only part of the deal, but it makes a difference. You can make a difference."
Seems pretty much standard to me, not just here on HN, but for all competitions where the public vote (elections included) for people to tell other people to vote for them.
Yes, at the bottom I ask HNers to please vote for us in the competition.
I think where I fail to follow you is where you suggest that somehow that's rigging the vote. How does publicly asking people to vote for you rig a public vote? Where do you think all the other votes are coming from?
I presume from people that are objectively judging all submissions side-by-side instead of by tapping in to the userbase of the fora they are members of.
vodafonemobileclicks.com is not a community site with an existing stream of people - the only people that get there is people that have arrived there through articles like this one, or through tweets to someone's followers.
It looks like Vodafone is actually using you to give exposure to their contest. A bit like the 'myminicity.com' website that was crazy popular for a while, with everybody spamming just about every place they could find with links to 'their' city. Only in this case it is your contest entry which might actually have some use instead of a bunch of numbers in a table somewhere.
What they are gauging with this as well is how big a userbase you can mobilize to decide which party is the best at marketing their product in ways that do not cost vodafone $.
And effectively by asking people to come and vote for you, you are not only promoting your own product, but also the vodafone contest and the vodafone brand without any cost to them.
Not cool to attempt to rig the vote though.