

Ask HN: Why does a small collection of sites make the Front Page so often? - SeanDav

This is a list of sites I put together off the top of my head that are always appearing on the HN Front Page:<p>techcrunch
engadget
nytimes
theAtlantic
forbes
techdirt
bbc.co.uk
extremetech
wired
arstechnika<p>These are all great sites, often with newsworthy content but the problem I have is they are all likely to be on many people's list of regularly visited sites, just like HN.<p>This also makes it easier to farm Karma by continually submitting links to any breaking stories on these sites.<p>My suggestion is that any links to these, and similar, sites need to have a "drag" factor attached so that they need for example 3x or 2.5x the comments to progress at the pace of a less "popular" site. The drag factor would increase to some maximum as the sites get submitted more often.<p>This way a really interesting story from a site with a high drag factor will still make the front page but we would get a chance to also see interesting stories from a much wider selection of sites.
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stephengillie
The rumor I've heard is that some of these sites, like extremetech (and
physorg and sciencedaily and pandodaily) use bots to auto-submit everything.

The assumption I'd make about the rest is that they hire college students to
pretend they're bots that auto-submit everything.

