Looks like op scrapes nautil.us and posts anything, which gives them more karma (~26000) as nautil.us articles generally do well. Creating a feedback loop.
Karma doesn't directly influence story submissions, so I don't think there's a feedback loop there (if that's what you mean).
The op gets karma from the submissions because they do well enough so the op just keeps submitting them. Feedback loop.
Sounds like a virtuous cycle, as opposed to a vicious cycle. We could do worse.
It produces a lot of "Yay! X" where in this case X is archeology/classical Greek civilization/ shipwrecks. Perhaps the X's it picks tend to stand out as intellectually interesting among a tide of "Yay! Money" and "Yay! Science" articles.
HN really likes nautilus content. Although dnetesn does post a lot of it.
nautilus (sailor in Greek) is posting an article about ships. That made me smile.