> If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit. > > If other people aren't interested Just a point of information: this

> If other people are interested, your story will make it to the front page on merit. > > If other people aren't interested Just a point of information: this is basically the "efficient market hypothesis" in another form. I agree that the market is more efficient than any other alternative, but I do not think that the market is perfect, or that HN upvotes/downvotes are perfect. In general, markets are better the more liquid they are, and the more people are involved. I think that NEW topics submitted to HN are viewed by very few people, and the result from the first few people upvoting a new topic can be HUGE, in that there's a feedback effect - they are exposed to new viewers the higher they rise. It would be quite interesting to do an A/B test at HN, where some topic that is of middlin' interest is introduced: half the viewers seen version A of HN where the topic is introduced at a karma of 1, and the other half of the viewers see version B of HN where the same topic, under a different name, is introduced at a karma of 10. If you ran this test 20 times I'd be amazed if the highest karma that the article got was similar even 70% of the time.