It's impressive how much less influential TechCrunch has become. To me, it's pretty clear that the main reason is the sheer number of articles they publish every day. Even if the overall audience is very large, the audience for each article isn't so high. On the plus side, the people who read articles self-select and are by definition interested in the topic, so the conversion rate in the end is higher. Bottom line: with TC, you reach a wide audience and extract the few that are relevant to your product.<p>Let's just say that 6 years ago when I launched on TC, the traffic numbers were much higher.
> [HN] ... get some friends to upvote the link early on, but don’t be tempted to try and game the voting system.<p>I'm puzzled by the idea that setting up an ad hoc voting ring (apparently with careful planning, as per the description on how to maximize the quality of the fraudulent clicks) is somehow not gaming the system.