It is still possible but it is very difficult. Google will show results by changing the ranks a little bit for random people to see which one has better CTR bu

It is still possible but it is very difficult. Google will show results by changing the ranks a little bit for random people to see which one has better CTR but mostly they are unchanged. It also probably knows that you would prefer your essay so it shows it higher than normal. And digg/reddit/hn results were manually de-emphasized by a google update, I think it might have been the Panda update or before that, so starting a link aggregator is also much harder than before. Google has given these websites a free moat.