If that were the case, wouldn't it have a low score? Instead of 17 votes? I regularly see theinformation.com posts highly upvoted on HN and as far as I know they're all paywalled. Also, it's not on the first 12 pages of the homepage, so there's basically no chance that this hypothesis could explain it, because it would have gotten down-voted to the second or at most third page, and then slowly drifted to later pages as the recent-ness component drags it down. Unless HN's algorithm is really different to Reddit's, that is.