I've seen lots of friends (including dozens of YC founders) ask for upvotes, usually via FB in ways that wouldn't necessarily constitute a ring (e.g. asking strangers in founder-friendly facebook groups), and they're usually of things worthy of publicity, and they do make it to the front page pretty quickly after the upvote requests.

I've also seen a lot of instances where posting once didn't do anything, and then posting a second time with an equivalent but different URL + asking a few friends to help upvote made it to the front page pretty quickly.

For example, I posted https://github.com/dheera/rosshow on 2019-Mar-27 -- no dice.

Then posted it again with a "www.", i.e. https://www.github.com/dheera/rosshow -- then asked a couple friends to upvote -- and then BAM front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19519165).

So the only thing I did differently between trial A and B was asked people to upvote, and trial B succeeded.