It feels pretty obvious to me - it's a well managed, useful product that offers a hosted version for free for any use, and it's truly universal - there aren't many developers who don't want source code control.
There is also the 'FOSS version of a popular proprietary thing' angle and the openness of the project that means there is more news about it to post.
In general, it feels pretty natural to me it would get posted about a lot, and upvoted a lot.
Thanks, but I agree with the sentiment that it we're a lot of HN these days, I can see people getting tired of it.
Frankly, I didn't expect the issue bash to get upvoted. We have our postmortem coming in a few minutes. I'm sure that will be much discussed here. We considered postponing that post but we promised it for this week and feel like we owe it to our users.
I've instructed all our people not to submit articles to HN but we can't prevent others from posting.
If you're implying that we did something to boost this post because Gitlab is a YC startup, we didn't. Matter of fact we penalized it as unsubstantive.
There's a standard moderation penalty for submissions whose only content is rallying users to some cause or event, since (however good the cause) that isn't intellectually interesting.
Other replies are implying vote rigging/bias. IMO, that's not the case in this instance, there are other terms which reliably get a lot of upvotes just because they are in the headline. (namely, Rust and Machine Learning)
