See How are stories ranked? in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Note that "number of comments" is not a factor.

It's common on HN for submissions to get upvoted before comments come in. It's a good sign, actually, if people aren't rushing to post reflexive things. Good comments are reflective, which means they happen after people have had time to process information—such as by reading an article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303565

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

It got published about 30 minutes ago. And has gotten a lot of likes early on, pushing it up.

Amazon review bots upvoting HN articles about themselves?

I wonder if it's a few keywords in there. Let me try.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33313447

let's see what happens.

It got 7 points and then flagged.

Then again maybe this is a bad test. Perhaps just reposting the above story in a way to dissuade human upvoters would be the right approach.

Then I'd have to withhold it for a couple hours and reveal it later

Good effort. Could just be some tech bro picking stuff sometimes. Whatever it is, I find the content some of the best on the net. Like and subscribe.