Ask HN: Why do “Show HN” posts rarely make it to the front page?

Because they don’t generate interest ?

But they get a number of upvotes (which could be considered a proxy indicator of interest). In some instances the show page top submission has a higher up vote count than most of the front page but still does not show up.

It's not for us mere mortals to try understand the HN home page algorithms .. but there are a couple of lines here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

There a few Ask HNs. You can see that the Ask HN page moves much slower.

So the upvotes are spread out over a long time, and the ranking algorithm heavily discounts spread-out upvotes.

two reasons:

1) top stories are usually very unique or a good debate

2) if it worked, people would work together to game the system.

> very unique

I once read a short article by a journal editor, on the theme of contributors describing their work as 'extremely unique'.

Something is either unique or it's not.

If anyone knows the article I'm referring to, I'd appreciate a link, I've been trying to find it again for a year or two.

Mainly because they are unique so they are not automatically upvoted when duplicates are submitted the way articles are.