The reason for this is that self posts are discounted at (and this is a guess, maybe PG can correct me) roughly 40% of what it would take to get a similar frontpage ranking for a regular post.

So even if your well formulated article that you posted on HN (nice, because you are obviously not in it for the advertising revenue) is voted up a few times its chances of being really discussed are very slim indeed.

On the other hand, you could post an external link to an article about prostitution ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075970) or the latest episode in one of the soaps (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075944) and you'd be guaranteed plenty of discussion.

The practical upshot of this is that if you really want an answer of if you really want to discuss a subject and you think that it is not mainstream enough to catch a couple of upvotes in the first half hour you can more than double your chances by posting it elsewhere and then submitting the link.

I don't pretend to understand the reason behind the penalty assigned to 'Ask HN' style posts and articles that are posted as original content on HN, I just notice that plenty of those seem to drop sight unseen whereas lots of trivial content makes the homepage without too much trouble, as long as it is on an external site.

We'll see if this post is self-defeating ;)

To see how big this effect is, as long as this post is on the homepage you can check it against other posts with links that have roughly the same number of points and age.