It is really easy to tell these stories. They have 30 or 40 votes and few comments. They are very often from YC companies. The better submitters will engage in

It is really easy to tell these stories. They have 30 or 40 votes and few comments. They are very often from YC companies. The better submitters will engage in the comments immediately to give a more organic lift, basically making the discussion more interesting to boost the story. But these posts don't last very long. They will quickly get off the front page unless there is actually something interesting here. It is funny, after all this strategy chatter, I happened to gripe about Quora on my blog, and that got more votes than anything else I've submitted, by far. A community of distributed actors with solid software filters makes for a pretty hard to game forum. After you have reasonable traction, it is probably better to spend your effort on more scalable channels.