I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points.

It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?

Mods are heavily involved in HN rankings and automation is a tie breaker. There's no way that happened by automation.