Hacker News is a communal content fountain. Lots and lots of websites use the HN rss feed to stock content, and where that content gains traction, it gets propa

Hacker News is a communal content fountain. Lots and lots of websites use the HN rss feed to stock content, and where that content gains traction, it gets propagated elsewhere. Slashdot, Reddit, tons of "news" aggregators, and so on, in a giant graph of relations where HN sits at the center, with the firehose of content getting actually curated and discussed here at the source. It means your upvotes and downvotes on this site are exponentially more impactful than any site downstream, because anything making it to the front page here will automatically get reposted to hundreds or thousands of other sites. There is virality, but there are also savvy content producers that know the overall graph of content dissemination, and they certainly utilize that to their benefit. There are a handful of similar sites and content aggregators that sit in the center like HN that determine what goes viral and what goes stagnant. It's what drew me to HN in the first place, after all the sites I liked were essentially showing me the same thing, and I had to figure out where they were getting their links from.