Comment by xnorswap

HN has a mechanism that causes popular blogs to stay popular.

It's a winner-takes-all karma prize for being first to post the article.

This causes a rush of people to post.

HN has a mechanism by which duplicate submissions count as upvotes toward the first submission.

This is a positive feedback for the desire to be first, which increases duplicate submissions and in turn the karma reward.

This effect means that good blogs stay well upvoted. This isn't altogether a bad thing, but it does mean some blogs require a string of poorly received posts before that effect wears off and people no longer rush to be first.

One way to fix this would be to attribute all karma to user simonw himself ( and do similar where attribution to an HN user is known. )