I'd humbly suggest that those two categories being treated the same on HN isn't right given how the latter may or may not be an originating story. There are a

I'd humbly suggest that those two categories being treated the same on HN isn't right given how the latter may or may not be an originating story. There are a lot of other mechanisms that deal with this stuff though. One is that press releases tend to be disfavoured in general - that takes care of press releases being boring. The 'you can write your own blog post with your own spin and title' thing - you totally can, and the level playing field then is competing with all other submissions. If the commentary is interesting enough, it will end up on the front page. If it's just content recycling, someone will notice and the URL and title will be replaced with the original by the 'use original sources' rule. If you follow dang's comments (essentially the public moderation log) you'll see most of these in action pretty quickly, at the price of having to trudge through a bunch of generic dang scoldings about other, more boring things.