No, just by observing the various postings and how they appear and disappear on the homepage.
I think this is one of the main reason why plenty of Ask HN style threads are gone before anybody gets a chance to look at them.
They're unpopular by definition, after all they ask the audience to do something (answer a question), this adds to that.
Then today I saw an Ask HN that was doing exceptionally well, and I noticed that the only thing that caused it to be ranked so high was that it was an external link.
The interesting bit is that there are some self posts (such as that specimen) that clearly deserve their 'weighting' but there are plenty of others that do not, and these fall victim to the collective punishment meted out to all submissions without urls.
I estimated the .4, so apparently it is even less.
I think that many of the Ask YC or Tell HN posts tend to get more votes more easily, so the weighting makes sense even good posts of that sort. I noticed this in the source while we were asking for advice, but we still got a lot more spotlight with the Ask HN tag than when we tried to do similar things with blog posts. The weighting makes sense to me.
I think that many of the Ask YC or Tell HN posts tend to get more votes more easily
Yes but do you wonder why that is?
From my own experience I know if I only have a minute or two, I hit on "New", scan down for Ask/Tell HN and then if they are decent posts, immediately upvote them. So sure, Ask/Tells get more votes from me because they are more likely to have unique content as opposed to the Nth million Apple Tablet rumour.
Moreover, even though I couldn't be further away from startup circles, it is clear that HN is clearly a startup community, and Ask/Tells are the posts that are most likely to tap that vein - so I upvote them in line with what I think are the community values. I mean, if I don't upvote a "Review my site" plea, what am I here for?
I'm not sure why exactly the ranking penalty for that is so large. It's all very well to say "well post it on your own blog", but the style of discourse over a blog posting is considerably different for what I see in Ask/Tells; the comments on the latter are generally more supportive as they are seen as a plea for help and less as an attempt at self-promotion - precisely because they are more transient. Moreover, an Ask/Tell in a way is a debate on neutral ground, whereas comments on somebody's personal blog post don't quite have the same dynamic.
http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc