Since the content is promoted by the users, Hacker News is what the majority of its readers wants it to be.
People that are interested in pure hacking stuff already found better sources, like good subreddits.
People that are interested in pure hacking stuff already found better sources, like good subreddits.
As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.
A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.
Same content, different user.
So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?
And different day, different time, different selection of users looking at /new.
I'm not saying there isn't favoritism (and I don't think that's necessarily bad), but there's also plenty of randomness involved.
You get about an hour on the first page of the new page. There need to be enough faces that are interested in your topic reading in that hour.