The magic of the fast inverse square root (2012)

The rule is unwritten for a reason; it may change without notice, and it most likely will change eventually. As HN grows and changes, both the HN forum software and people who run HN try to adjust accordingly.

It's difficult to show the work involved with keeping HN clean, since any details posted would just be abused to game the system. By default, killed comments and stories are hidden, so you'd need to turn on "showdead" in your HN profile to even see the junk. Since the junk is hidden, it's are not indexed by search engines, and hence, it can't be found with common search engines. The associated Algolia HN Search powering the search box on the bottom of most HN pages also deletes the junk, eventually, even though it might initially index and show it for a short time.

The "News-To-Me" and related "Nobody-Noticed" problems turn out to be horrendously difficult when you ponder them in depth. Every discussion system is subject to attempts to game the system. Some attempt to gain magic imaginary Internet points, or improve their reputation, or promote of their content and comments. Others try to suppress and demote bad news, or technologies they don't like. There are rings, bots, and similar user clusters using voting, flagging and submitting in attempts to manipulate results.

Merging all of the related submission links into the active submission on a general "story" topic (e.g. all of the recent Pluto related news stories) has been mentioned numerous times, but it is far more difficult than it seems at first glance. A blogspam link to a Pluto story should definitely not be merged with links to stories from NASA, BBC, NYT, and other original and reputable sources. Your idea of "merge and share the imaginary Internet point rewards" would unfortunately fail. Abusive people would game it immediately. Also, it would be a ton of mostly manual work sifting the good from the crud, and dealing with the usual complaints.