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.