It's not entirely mysterious: because of the way votes are weighted, the timing of the first two or three really matters. If you manage to get them while you're still on the new page, you have a good chance of getting on the front page which is the only way to get much exposure. If you fall off the new page without that, your article is essentially forgotten.

This means the success of your article falls down to the whims of the few people browsing `new' at any given moment. If you're lucky, there are people interested in your topic there; if not, your article might easily fall through the cracks. Moreover, since `new' has a very bad signal to noise ratio, most people do not spend very much time there. I certainly don't! So this means it's even more likely for an article to fall through the cracks there.

For better or worse, this means HN misses out on good articles as they fall through `new' without getting votes. To get anywhere your article needs to be both good and lucky.

Or have friends. The first few votes matter a LOT. So as soon as you submit you ask 3 friends to vote it up (make sure they vote within a few minutes of each other).

That gives a chance. If the community doesn't like it it won't stay up, but it gives you at least a chance.

Actually, you're describing a voting ring, which is against the rules and is bannable. Luckily the software is intelligent enough that it detects people who do such things and automatically nullifies the effect of those votes.

I guess so. I should clarify I've never actually done this, just seen other people [say they] did it. And watching the vote patterns correlated with homepage position on my few submissions tells me it would work.

BTW I don't see any mention of this in the rules.

From the other submission, a link to Ziptr's announcements: http://www.ziptr.com/ziptr-closing-92713

On the upside, if it's really important, it tends to reappear again and again until it gets picked up.

HN: Lots of false negatives, few persistent false positives.

The timing makes all the difference. Luck, too.

A while back, I wrote a little app that tracks the relative scores of new submissions and the front page, which tries to tell you when would be a good time to post: http://hnnotify.leknarf.net/

The twitter notification part broke at some point (I haven't had time to fix it), but the main chart is surprisingly accurate. It shows that it's been a good time to post for the last hour or so, so this submission was very well timed. That other submission was sent at a particularly poor time (about 2 hours ago), when few people were upvoting on the new page.

Timing really does make a big difference.