I'm currently on vacation.

It is not automated but I concede that hn might have become an excessive hobby over time (wait until you see the log of articles I don't submit though! so there is also some curation on my side).

It basically is as simple as: I stumble over something interesting, thinking one thing that would be even better than this is a whole discussion about it, submit, crickets or discussion actually happens.

edit: many (most?) submissions (like this one for example [0]) are actually based on something I read on hn so there is some tree traversal and recursion going on as well now that I think of it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31272682 (h/t drewzero1)