This is the third time someone has asked me this since yesterday, so there's clearly a real question here, and maybe a solution that we haven't found yet.

We can help 'propel' things for a few hours, but after that the posts look weird on the front page, e.g. if they have say 3 points and are many hours old. Plus we want to be able to invite reposts for things that are much older. If we notice—or anyone points out—a years-old submission that was fabulous and went nowhere, let's give it another shot. That's not an uncommon case.

If anyone can suggest a better solution than "make a new post in append-only fashion" I'd love to hear it.

> If anyone can suggest a better solution than "make a new post in append-only fashion" I'd love to hear it.

Command tab category: "featured", where submissions are ordered in a way that certain "editor's choice" submissions are boosted.

This solves the problem of propelled posts looking "weird" on the front page; they look weird where that is the behavior.

"Featured" doesn't have to be ever-present; if there is nothing being featured at the moment, the link can disappear. Its intermittent manifestation could help get it noticed and used.

Not sure you know how the algorithms on reddit or hacker news work but typically they are a function of some combination of log(upvotes) and time. The log function (or some closely related function that hacker news may use) ensures that the first couple votes are the most crucial to bring submissions higher on the front page. That being said, the variance on these first votes are high and basically determine whether or not the submission will be successful. Date and time also greatly affect how popular an article will be. Thus the re-submissions.