Great post. Your early experience and lessons learned closely mirror mine.

Something to understand about SN, is that while it's maintained a fairly consistent vibe, the community is still small and quickly evolving. That's another part of why it's not really worth being overly strategic. Each new active user changes the amount of engagement on different types of content.

I'm glad another person who appreciates what Stacker News is doing found their way here.

Good luck in the contest and happy zapping!