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surround parent
This article is from 2013. Does HN currently do something like this?
lhoff
The article was updated 2019. The update is at the end of the article. According to the update HN tried it but it didn't work well.
btilly
Not to the best of my knowledge.

If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front page fairly easily. (This one got there with 5 votes.) Once on the front page it snowballs. The obvious solution to that is to ask a handful of friends to vote for it. HN has a solution for that workaround by identifying vote rings and banning them, plus banning the site that was attempting to do that. So getting on the front page remains a crapshoot, even for good material.

dang
> If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front page fairly easily.

In principle yes, but HN's anti-voting-ring software often drops a lot of those votes. If you see something on /newest with a bunch of votes and it's not on the front page, that's likely why. A side-effect that we never anticipated is that some eagle-eyed HN users figured this out and started calling out the egregious cases. So we got a secondary hivemind ring-detector out of the deal.

ShamelessC
Yeah this is confusing to me because they imply you need a certain score to get on the front page but I'm seeing plenty of links on my front page with very few upvotes.
thrower123
The decay rate for front page items has always felt off to me. Quite often you'll see articles with 20-30 points and no comments camp in the middle of the front page all day, while more actively discussed items drop off.
dang
Comments don't affect story rank, with the exception of the flamewar detector mentioned in the sibling comment by krapp. It's not uncommon for certain kinds of story to get plenty of upvotes but no comments. Those stay on the front page for a while. I think that's fine; something can be interesting even though we don't have anything to say about it.
krapp
Items with active discussions are often implicitly penalized, because the number of comments are often greater than the number of upvotes, which is interpreted as a sign of low quality discussion or possible flamewar.
angry_octet
Post time of day is influential for most social media. This possibly depends on if a topic is more US or Europe relevant.

Different sources of the same breaking news seem to have widely divergent scores, well before the content is read.

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