Just to provide a counterpoint, I submitted a pretty simple Chrome extension 2 months ago and got 270 upvotes and around 2k visits to it's website. It ended up no. 6 for the day so almost made it in the daily newsletter. It was my first time submitting anything, was pretty much inactive before it and all the promotion I did at the time was tweeting to my 400 followers.
That must be the difference (or I was blocked by some filter). I didn't try to make a social-media call-for-action, because I didn't want to trigger voting-ring protections.
EDIT. As for the filters... PH doesn't allow comments which include "ps aux" or "curl" strings. I learned this by studying HTTP responses using Developer Tools, because the error was not signalled in PH's UI :).
It IS possible to get lucky on content aggregation sites without any magic. I've had this happen for me in several places – HN, Reddit, Medium. But it's very hit and miss. You can post something great and have it totally miss 9 out of 10 times. Most people aren't interested in sifting through the new stuff – they just want to engage with whatever's already popular. If even 5-10% of a community was committed to rigorously assessing new submissions, then quality would rise to the top – but most people tend to just upvote whatever is already on the up-and-up.
This "Mathew effect" is the case with a lot of things – book deals and record deals, for instance. Unknown artists occasionally do get their big breaks by being in the right place at the right time. But if you're managing one (even if it's yourself), it makes sense to improve your odds by being systematic, and yes, basically cosying up to the gatekeepers whoever they are.
I think PH is different because it seems that if a superuser/mod will not upvote an item, it will be practically dead. On HN/Reddit/Medium you will always get at least 20-50 views. On PH I got 5. It's even more stark when you count the fact that top PH submissions get many more views than on HN/Reddit/Medium.
