[ilyanep]

Thanks for the response! What I meant by "hard-coded" penalty, is there is a list of domains somewhere and "reddit.com" is on it. I was wondering if that was the case, or if these domains were discovered automatically somehow. Based on your description, it sounds like it's the former and then occasionally the penalty is negated automatically?

[dang]

Yup that's correct.

[kuschku]

So thats why so many frontpage articles on HN are blogspam versions of comments copy-pasted from reddit threads, in contrast to linking the actual threads directly? That explains a lot.

[dang]

Do you have links to these?

[kuschku]

I used to have links to these, but in the 1.5 hours I had to wait before I could send a comment again ("You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."), I lost them. You might want to just check them yourself – often the reddit thread is mentioned in the comments, or as source in the blog post.