There are humans involved. Contributions that are deemed worthy are kept on the front page long enough to accumulate more upvotes.

Years ago I was on reddit, but quit due to the bot activity (very arbitrary censorship). This site seems much more interesting. Always some good fresh topics and no ads :-)

My impression is HN is being more heavily spammed lately. This needs heavier automated filters and this means more legitimate links end up marked dead on arrival.

The end result is poorer content and less variety.

It may well be just my impression though.

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Other than that I don't know what exactly you mean by "their content within the sections" or what are you correlating to the rank.

I don't think so. I have "showdead" turned on so I see the automatically dead articles. The usual suspects of certain sites and users appear. I will say that I'm seeing a lot more green-colored aliases submitting the automatically dead links. I suspect certain IP addresses and/or ASNs submissions are marked dead

Yes it's been gradually taking over the web for some time now, at this point Reddit and Twitter are completely unusable. It turns out flooding social media with LLM slop is the killer-app of AI that no one talks about. HN seemed safe for a long time but recently the bot presence has become very obvious. All you can do is keep searching for greener pastures. Small web and fediverse is more interesting these days anyway.

No, the ordering of stories on the front page has nothing to do with the content, and any link between pairs of items is purely coincidental. Ordering is based on the score that's calculated from upvotes, time since posting, and downweights from flags and various penalties. There are too many variables (most of which we don't control and which change from minute to minute) for it to be possible to group content types together.