I think a lot of getting to the front page depends on your random luck of the first 10 people that see the post. If enough of those 10 like your thing, it gets seen by thousands more and may make it to the front page. If none of those 10 do, it's fades away. It's 10 people out of millions that visit HN, so there's a lot of variability. You could post the exact same thing 15 minutes later then the first time and get a totally different "first 10" and that post could perform completely differently.
Yeah, all good points. I guess I'm partially just confused about the dupe detector. E.g., when I post something that someone else has already submitted recently, it just redirects me to the existing post.
Re the luck factor, part of the appeal of Hacker News is there seems to be a lot of work done to minimize the role of luck. Which generally felt like it worked well for me historical, just not recently.
Not a big deal in any event, but if there's something I should be doing differently, I'd like to do it.
Yeah, unfortunately I think a huge amount still comes down to luck.
HN is better then any other platform (which is incredible considering how many engineers work on it) at detecting fraud (e.g. "upvote rings"). But I think a ton still comes down to the first few people that see the post.
