Weird. As it turns out, the feature that I was complaining about reddit not having (not being able to add/remove without training the filter) was added an hour after I made this comment.
I know that most, if not all of the earlier admins are on HN. Reddit was originally funded by ycombinator. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that the new guys do as well.
As far as self promotion, there isn't a whole lot of consensus on it. The community aspect of the site is somewhat at odds with the link aggregator model. If bloggers submit all of their content, pretty much automatically, and don't contribute to the community in other ways, that doesn't really tend to go over so well. As a result, people who create content are expected to invest time and energy into becoming part of the community so they can accurately gauge how their content will be received.
It's not just supposed to be a place to dump all your links.
/r/programming is more biased towards the link aggregator model than the rest of the site, however the community aspect is still there. Someone mentioned a 10:1 ratio for other content to your own, however in /r/programming, I usually say that 50/50 is fine.
