Sure, I also, still, feel some of the kinetics need to be explained to avoid confusion.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.
The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.