Because your post fell below the bar for 'significant attention' as explained in the comments I linked to.
Edit:
Why not do it like a lottery with more than one winning ticket sold? Share the karma pool among the OP and the reposters. Just an idea.
Or, let the reposter keep the karma, but put a byline saying something like 'first posted by user123 on jan 2, 1969' with a link? I care far more about attribution than karma. I care about making good posts, but if someone else gets the credit, why would I bother? If no one will see it, the intrinsic value to me is something I already had. To share is to be seen. If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it and all that.
The reason for wanting to do that is incentivize finding good stories that haven't been posted yet: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I couldn’t agree more, by the way. It isn’t important. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
I hope that makes sense. I don’t disagree about karma caps. Reddit handles aspects of this karma perverse incentives problem differently for text posts earning no karma, while link posts do. If I got that right. In any case it’s a thorny problem and I think that what exists at HN now works pretty well. I’m sure it can be better, and I can’t think of a better team to think about how and why.
None of them got there by being the first to get breaking stories onto the site. They got there by regularly posting interesting comments and articles, consistently over several years.
Though if you look at their submission histories, plenty of what they've posted has received few/no upvotes. Some users will even post the same article every few months for a year or more, before it ever gets voted onto the front page.
Consistent contribution over the long term is what's key.
There are plenty of HN contributors who aren't well known at all for posting comments, but who have huge karma counts just for consistently posting interesting articles, and much of it is years-old, or about non-current topics like history, philosophy, literature, architecture etc.
Someone like that won't be bothered if other people sometimes get the karma for a story that they had submitted earlier. They will just keep posting several interesting articles every week or even every day, knowing that overall their contribution is valuable and that karma allocation will balance out fairly over the long term.
I think you're cycling through a sort of greatest hits of various common misconceptions about the way HN works and you're better off just reading dang's moderator comments for a little bit - this stuff comes up all the time and he addresses it with better detail, accuracy and nuance than I can. You'll be in a better position to then make your critique rather than debating it with less familiarity and with some internet rando who's lecturing you about how you have it all wrong.