It's a chicken and egg problem. To get a lot of incoming links you need to be popular. To become popular (via search engines, at least) you need a lot of incoming links. This heavily penalizes smaller websites and rewards incumbent players on the web who have dedicated marketing teams that can afford to spend several hours a day on social network promotions and viral campaigns.
It's a niche topic, so there aren't any other sites that discuss my topic (except news articles).