[kianN]

I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes)

The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.

Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/

[altairprime]

Please email the mods your shaky evidence; they care about that and have more detailed logs to investigate with!

[kianN]

I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold.

> Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders).

Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int...

It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?