Does The Cream Really Rise To The Top?

The fact that this has to happen to have content rise to the top is a bug, and it needs to be fixed. It's understandable that many people won't visit the "new" page, and that most consumers don't upvote, but that doesn't mean that something shouldn't be done about it. Maybe 10% of posts on the front page (random placement) should be new content being given a chance to be voted up. Maybe those submissions could also be marked in some way, so it's clear why they are shown (but only if doing so won't cause people to ignore those submissions).

This is called cheating.

I see it all the time. It's a well tested road for the mediocre people to gain short term glory.

But, by cheat, their average work is making the whole community - average.

Do things, write about it. Post the writing on Hacker News. Get your friends to vote for it. Hope it all doesn't happen the same day as the latest national-security disaster. Ad nauseam.

/new here is woefully broken. Front page material is either all fad and hype or clown-sourced friend upvotes (except these days, it's not manipulation—it's "hustling").

I've started posting things to /new once or twice a week, but I don't have a cabal of friends to manipulate the system in my favor. My unworthy posts just die. (It's possible I have entirely crap content too. Need more datapoints to reach a stable conclusion.)

Better solution: write more, whine less, throw in tangentially-related fad-titled clickbait every so often to actually get someone to read your words.