TBH I cannot think of other sites that are better for a potential cascading run than HN. I've seen some amazing memetic threads here. As you surmise its all about initial conditions. This could easily have gone another way. Time of day, mood, whether there's a another very active thread....HN is very fickle and sensitive. 95% of all my submissions (which are predominantly for our podcast) fall on stony ground. Every now and then maybe you hit paydirt.

> repost

I've found that you can gently bring people round to an idea. Look at how the "algorithm" works here. People post related subjects and they or others post follow-on connections soon after to ride the mood.

So for example you'll see a post about permutations in game theory, and then a post about enumerating chess moves, and then a thread about the differences between Go and chess... there's a subtle logic.

I also note the "Overton window" (or subject attention span) for HN is about 48 hours. So, sow the seeds by submitting topics on "participatory games", "chain letters", "Chinese whispers", "stochastic composition"... and then re-test your experiment with the crowd primed.