In my experience HN is far more random than both Twitter and Reddit. It's very frustrating and disappointing.
If you get five votes in the first minute you'll almost certainly be on the front page. If you get one downvote in the first minute you'll almost certainly never make the front page.
I've been thinking a long time on a solution for this. My gut feeling is that every post should start with 10 points. That way one downvote won't kill it, and one upvote will only be 1/11 of the total score, instead of 100% of it.
Usually at reddit the way we would tweak these things is Chris would graph out each candidate algorithm in matlab and then we would go with the one that most continuous and "looked right", but you sort of need a PhD in Physics to get that right. :)
My current theory that is entirely without basis or data to back it up is certain users are given a lot more weight. A post of mine with 6 to 10 upvotes won't make it to page 2, but I'll see some with 4 upvotes on the front page. Oh well.
Almost certainly not. My submissions regularly reach the front page, but it's still a very small fraction, and, as you observed, often only at the fourth or fifth try.
HN's "submission success" is indeed highly random. Your submission gets between few minutes and two hours at /newest (and if it's got longer that's because it's a time of low activity: nighttime in America).
Either the "right" readers for your submission happen to be active at this timespan, or they don't.
The mods do have the ability to "slow down" a post, if they think it will cause a flame war or is actively causing one. It basically makes it fall quickly by increasing the number of votes needed to reach the same position.
But having some votes worth more than others would be in opposition to the egalitarian principles of the site.
Oh, and when YC partners and founders log into HN, they get highlights for other YC people, so it may look like YC people are getting a boost, but really they're just getting more visibility to a subset of users, who tend to upvote other YC users quickly.
I’ve tried experimenting at all times of day. I like around 8am pacific. That’s almost lunchtime on the east coast, but Europe is still up to. It takes time to rise. If you take off then you’ll be placed high from east coast dinner time and hopefully through west coast evening.
Getting more than 10 clicks on HN is a complete and total dice roll. As best I can tell there is no rhyme or reason. Not for my content at least. r/programming r/cpp and r/rust have been highly reliable for me. Consistent top 5 placement.
For context here’s my archive. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/