The only way that I can ever summarise Hacker News to people is "a collection of things that are interesting to technology people". That is the (intended) effec

The only way that I can ever summarise Hacker News to people is "a collection of things that are interesting to technology people". That is the (intended) effect of the voting system (assuming you're happy with the sweeping categorisation of the people on here as technology people). Some of us like to hear about Interesting new science Attempts to land a rocket on a floating launch pad New releases of a bit of open source software New releases of closed source software (you might not like Windows, but a new release is still significant). etc. Why not information on a new release of a computer game[1]? Lots of people on here use (play) them? Why is that materially different than a new release of an OS? My mentality with upvoting things isn't "plugging something", it's "this is interesting, you should all see this". It's not advertising, it's like minded people communicating information of interest to them, in exactly the same way that you might be chatting to someone at the watercooler and ask them if they saw that Fallout 4 was going to be released. [1] Obviously that would fit in the 'new releases of closed source software" anyway