the stuff of yours that got voted up, is what you found online at popular sites. The reason it bypasses the death, is that other people try to submit it too, at which point it gets 1 extra upvote.<p>I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin.<p>For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page.<p>Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that.<p>In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.