[AnonC]

The latter would create a bubble of some people’s submissions flooding the site over time and not allowing others’ submissions to come to the front page.

The ranking is affected to a good extent by when a post is submitted because of the times (and time zones) when more HN voters are online and active.

[nick-garfield]

Yeah this is really interesting. The "velocity" of upvotes/comments seems to be more important than the actual raw count.