I would say GP is in the wrong, based on their explanation. I think this type of thing is not okay. (The "I told my friends and they made a comment innocently"). You're basically causing activity that goes against the spirit of HN and these users have clearly not bothered to read the guidelines, and then you're washing your hands off of this, even though you directly caused it.

Look at this thread for example. [0] I'm sure it's a case of the same phenomenon. What are these people adding to the discussion!?

Sure, it's not a big deal. Refusing to acknowledge that it's annoying or that it happened because of you is just weird, though. It's not even a good look for your post, anyway, and HN has even gone so far as to penalize posts for direct-link upvoting, so they very clearly don't want this and you probably had to explain some kind of shady workaround to your friends if you still ended up on the front page.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28541598

Having reflected on this I agree with you.

Yes, it's annoying, and blame does lie with me for it happening because I did let friends know about the launches for this on HN, and the comments that come from that are entirely predictable.

Actually it's annoying on a deeper level for me too: I've realised through the referenced comment links that I thought the account in question was an actual user on the original launch post, where I responded to them with an enthusiastic thanks, but in fact it wasn't real positive feedback just one of my friends trying to help. Which is nice, but not very useful for me. I still don't know which friend this is, by the way :-D

Overall I learned for future to just not do this again at all. It just doesn't help on these launch posts anyway, the amount of interest they need to actually get on the front page and stay there is way above what just a handful of friends upvoting or commenting can do for you. When it happens it always happens because people find the actual thing interesting, so there's no point trying to induce that if it doesn't exist. But it's so easy to feel like you want to do everything possible to help get something out there that, as the parent says in a downstream comment, you've poured your heart and soul into.

And you're right, ultimately it's against the spirit of HN and not how we want this place to work. I'm a long time member of this community, it's my favourite place on the internet to be honest, I want to see its standards maintained, and should be doing my best to do that.