4 ms·

"Randomness" doesn't explain anything. That is just the modern day version of "the gods willed it".

• tomhoward 7y ago
  Your original submission got one upvote. Which means that one person who happened to be looking at the "New" page when it was submitted thought the title was interesting enough to look at the article and then upvote it. Maybe it because it was a low-traffic time of day, or people were focused on other things, or ... who knows? If, instead of one person, it happened to be be two or three, it would have made it to the front page and you would've received all the karma from further upvotes. The thing that makes the difference between one upvote vs 2-3 is a whole lot of unknowable factors that is reasonable to put down to "randomness". That's how HackerNews has worked for all of the 10+ years I've been using it. What alternative explanation do you propose? Like I said, it sucks when you miss out on the karma, but if you strongly believe it's a solid article you can resubmit it or email the mods and ask them to put it in the second-chance pool, which they're always happy to do if it's good content.