I liked what the author posted in the comments section:<p><i>Sigh. My silly rant about ponies gets to #1 on Hacker news, while my serious, carefully researched 3000-word post on host-proof hosting languishes in obscurity. Oh, the humanity. ;)</i>
This highlights a more general problem: aggregation sites have algorithmic ways to bring content which is both "new" and "popular" to the forefront, while keeping spam and lame content off of the main page, and these algorithms can sometimes be hacked or gamed.<p>One political blog I read was often reposted to reddit and similar sites by its detractors, who would mis-title the posts in offensive ways and therefore get them buried. This is more or less the problem described here -- by submitting the post with a title that gets either automatically blocked or ignored/downvoted by the community, one can easily bury posts that might otherwise garner a fair bit of traffic.<p>Once it becomes common to game any particular aggregator, it becomes less trustworthy and therefore less useful as a filter. (IMO, HN's policy of not editorializing post titles is a good way to prevent this particular form of abuse.)