I would love to know more about what this means.

Not dang (parent comment above) but this means that the topic is of interest to the general HN crowd and humanity. Unfortunately, it didn't get the front-page treatment on time. The options are to give it a push once it is re-submitted or some magic and then gets another chance.

I love this and makes HN lot more humane than just a bunch of algorithms.

Brajeshwar explained it, but I'll add that sometimes we can just put the posts directly into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so they get a random placement on HN's front page. But we don't do that if they're more than about 2 days old. After that, we email the submitter a repost link. If they use the link, it will create a fresh submission and then we can put that one into the SCP.

The downside is that if we don't have an email address for the submitter, we can't email them a repost invite! Then I have to resort to off-topic pleadings. That's what you saw.

Thanks. My confusion stemmed from my belief that I clicked through from the first page, so while I was aware of the typical second chance pool from earlier discussion of it, I didn't think that covered this case. But it's quite possible that I misremembered where I saw it.