[sillysaurus3]

There's a chance HN could be artificially compressing the number of upvotes site-wide in order to maintain the illusion of smallness. Reddit did this same thing for nearly a decade. E.g. Obama's AMA only appeared to have 14k upvotes even though in reality hundreds of thousands of people voted on it.

It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.