It means your upvotes and downvotes on this site are exponentially more impactful than any site downstream, because anything making it to the front page here will automatically get reposted to hundreds or thousands of other sites.
There is virality, but there are also savvy content producers that know the overall graph of content dissemination, and they certainly utilize that to their benefit.
There are a handful of similar sites and content aggregators that sit in the center like HN that determine what goes viral and what goes stagnant. It's what drew me to HN in the first place, after all the sites I liked were essentially showing me the same thing, and I had to figure out where they were getting their links from.
The meta part I find funny is that it's on HN, this supposed bastion of articles "interesting to hackers" or whatever. This is why I like Reddit subs... I can just subscribe to the general topics or themes I want to hear about and skip the pablum
Sarcasm aside, what reason does which 'propaganda machine' have for considering this story relevant to anything they might care about?
From what I can tell the mainstream media (which unfortunately has blended itself into a stew of "real news" and opinion pieces through their own outlets and through various readers) exists to serve a couple of interests.
In this case, I think this would be called "earned media" in marketing speak. A "journalist" or someone working in a news organization knows a bunch of PR associated people who have lines on what could be called lifestyle newspieces. The juicier the lifestyle piece the more clicks the org gets, so cultivating these relationships with PR firms that push this stuff results in revenue for the news org. That PR firm might push the segment onto multiple receivers, so you get a little critical mass.
The second interest, what the parent poster is alluding to, is the political party that the news organization and their journalists are aligned with. Since everything political now is so existential, the entire news organization ends up having this zeitgeist of pushing their political agenda. And obviously we are at where we are at in no small part by the shock outrage clicks political news headlines receive.
So, I don't think the parent is wrong, but it's more complicated than "it's all propaganda". Criticising the mainstream media has become popular in the last 10 years, but goddamn it's so easy to do because of how transparent the whole process has become.
The idea that everyone not constantly reading about whatever political story I am obsessed with is distracted by propaganda and that’s the only reason social change doesn’t occur is frankly horseshit.