To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.
HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.