[harvestmoon]

This may be the case, but it surprises me. In the 3-4 years I've used HN, I haven't noticed it.

If you are a very well known user like patio, it's possible that you'll get a good amount of upvotes more easily. For most users, however, it seems to me to be a matter of good title, good content and luck as to whether or not your submission does well.

[minimaxir]

Interesting that you give patio as an example, since his last submission was about a year ago, with most of his submissions being 4 years old: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=patio11

Patio's comments, in my experience, are an outlier in quality/length, so it's hard to use that as a trend.

[harvestmoon]

Good catch (used Patio11 because off the top of my head can't think of other popular users by their handle).

Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.