How would you prefer bloggers to measure success? I assume that most writers would measure success in readership, influence, or money. Traffic seems pretty close to readership. Influence is harder to measure, but generally the more readers, the more influence. And money from a website is generally proportional to traffic.
Well, I'd wish they'd measure it by the quality of their writing and the discussion it generates instead of hits. But it's up to them how to measure success.
I'm only concerned with how that perception of success affects HN. Presently, it's too easy for bloggers to choose to discuss A Most Excellent Technology in the hopes of making the front page. The actual writing may not make any points beyond, "vim changed my life!" but, still, it's put on the front page by the bikeshedding committee, thus perpetuating the feedback loop. You may argue that certain tools have a favored status within certain groups, and that is fine -- I'd prefer if people were picky about their tools. But the standard must be raised on bikeshedding articles beyond mere sentiments of "I like this technology." There needs to be an intellectual gain made from the blog post, not simply an opinion being expressed.
Otherwise, HN risks becoming like every other social news site, where people upvote the articles they want to see to the point of creating more noise than signal. We are still have quite a ways to go before we're there, but the recurrence of topics is a bit troubling.
That's a fairly pessimistic view of "most writers." I would hope that most authors would pick topics based on their own intellectual curiosity, and enjoy readership/influence/money as a secondary benefit of their work. But perhaps I am being unrealistic?
