It's an interesting question. I could see it being a mix of that and a poor-quality ranking algorithm, so that it's too easy for articles to end up buried. Mos

It's an interesting question. I could see it being a mix of that and a poor-quality ranking algorithm, so that it's too easy for articles to end up buried. Most examples of this are one person submitting daily articles from their own site or sites they're paid to market. Sometimes even those end up near the top of the front page, and often when that happens, if one looks at prior submissions from that same person and site, the article that made the front page seems like it would do worse than prior articles. I could see all of this as an indicator that the ranking/voting doesn't do a great job of letting interesting stuff get a shot, nor of penalizing folks who constantly submit posts on their own site (for months - different than this situation). The "New" page is easy enough to ignore that I could imagine few visitors looking at it regularly, so the profile of visitors to that page is different than to the home page.