It got more upvotes because of the errant Show HN than it would have otherwise. More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN—more like a joke riff on a cliché category of article. Am I missing something?
I'll trust you on that and reiterate my apologies. I have never thought that Show HNs get more votes by default (look at the Show HNs in my history, you'll see they got absolutely nowhere), and was not trying to game the system.
> More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN
I thought that this was mostly determined by whether or not the HN community upvotes a link. I personally do think there's a role for (perhaps infrequent) satire about certain quite cringe-inducing types of articles you get here. I saw a similar piece the other day - can't recall the link though.
Upvotes are great, because the entire point of HN is to be interesting to the community. But moderators and software are needed too. If the site were determined only by upvotes, ironically it would soon cease to be interesting to the community.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
By the way, this isn't primarily because moderators are smarter or more competent than community members. It's because we're in a position to give HN our full attention and think about the global optimum. Users are giving much less attention to the site (at least I hope they are) and reacting quickly to the specific things they run across. I wrote about that here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209.
> And if you'd like to read a true, but much more boring story about getting MRR, go here.
Not everybody might like that type of humor, but I found it amusing ;-)