Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336

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aurareturn 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

My theory is that it highly depends on the few random people who view New posts and if they upvote/comment.

The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.

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morkalork 4 days ago | parent [-]

Exactly. Depending on the traffic in newest, stories can slip in disappear in the flow

	▲	aurareturn 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think just like how new comments can go to the top of a post, I think HN should change the algorithm such that new posts can sometimes go to the top of HN as a way to quickly test if the post is worthy or not. A lot of high quality posts have 0 upvote and 0 comment.

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dang 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's too much randomness to expect any consistency.

Sometimes we re-up things for that reason (basically the second-chance pool mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). I've done that with this one.

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TillE 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!

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ChrisArchitect 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really news in this state. Because other than a few more details here it's not any different than the story from last week (which we knew Oracle was in the mix etc). The deal isn't final.

	▲	slg 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is funny to say this as if there was some past story on here that everyone saw. In the last month, the story about a potential TikTok deal with the most engagement maxed out at 3 comments and 17 points[1]. This is probably the most important news in the social media sphere since Musk bought Twitter and the HN audience doesn't care about it until contracts are signed? That's pretty unbelievable. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249430
	▲	metalman 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		details, NO algorythm, Trumpy, China, Money, Twitteresque user base revolt....or worse so it's very much as you state, non final