[EGreg]

From my experience, things I used to submit 5-7 years ago got to the front page organically. Literally nothing I submit now gets to the front page, and you can see the wide variety of things in my profile, including SHOW HN, ASK HN, etc.

Here is an example SHOW HN that had all the elemnents you speak of but went nowhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714

Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.

PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.