One of the most delightful things involving reading HN is seeing a strange, context-less post in the morning, and then, later in the day or evening, coming across another piece of information- maybe a popular article on another website or a very popular youtube video- that then leads you to some research hole, possibly wikipedia'ing and following the older, linked sources- where you wind up on the exact page linked from the random post that morning and it becomes pretty obvious that you just retraced the exact steps that a like-minded individual had done earlier that day.

It's happened to me several times where I doubt it could be simply recency bias coupled with chance of topics, due to the specificity and narrow directed-ness of the graph.

same. it happens to me all the time on HN.

on one hand, i feel like this is a text-book example of the Bader-Meinhoff illusion [0].

but... there's an actual causal mechanism that could drive it.

show an interesting article to the HN crowd -> some subset of HN readers are inspired to go down a wikipedia rabbit hole and post some cool thing they found back on HN -> people that saw the original interesting post will not only see the related followup post, but they'll upvote it and cause even MORE to see it

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion