Is this the reason that so many of his recent posts were promoted on here? Was the intention to build the cachet of some widely read essays so he could credibly step in for PG?
No. We didn't manipulate the scores of these (or any other) posts. Presumably the reason Sam started writing a lot in 2012 was the same reason I started trying to recruit him then: he was finished working for Green Dot.
Your hypothesis and the one I floated aren't mutually exclusive.
My idea doesn't necessitate a conspiracy or playing with the points/ranking, which PG is rather quick to deny in his reply to me. It could have just been a plan for Sam to release blog posts over a period of time and try to get them read. I'm curious if this was a conscious effort to build something akin to http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html given the role he was being groomed for. Of course, I'm also always curious about the way this site really works on the inside.
In that comment, he claims he is simply blogging to "practice writing." From the vantage point of this announcement two days later, that sounds coy, even obtuse.
I mean, they own the platform, they have active mods, and constantly float YC related news to the top and suppress news with particular keywords or from particular domains.
HN stories for his blog start about a year ago, a little after this article says the idea originally was floated (mid-2012), and they have pretty consistently frontpaged: http://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/blog.sa...
It makes me wonder if it was a coordinated, planned effort.