Yes, some of those tactics are being employed, however the number of users is so low it doesn't really matter. To get technical, since this is HN, the photo di

Yes, some of those tactics are being employed, however the number of users is so low it doesn't really matter. To get technical, since this is HN, the photo distribution part is done by a Lua script running inside of redis instance which does just that, distributing images based on current demand and skewed towards recent ones. But if the number of images is small, every image will try to be distributed.