(I'm not an admin. You probably want to email HN because they won't see the question otherwise.)
In the past HN had a fairly strict dupe-detection filter.
That meant that a lot of good stories that didn't get attention on the first posting didn't get reposted.
Currently the dupe-detection is much weaker than it used to be. A story that didn't get much attention on the first post can be reposted easily now.
HN tried an experiment where they'd email people and ask them to repost submissions, and give those reposts a small bump. That was a lot of work, so they only do that for "Show HNs". Now they do something like an auto-repost which resets the timestamp.
This means that sometimes you'll post something, and it won't get much attention, and a few hours later someone else will post the same thing and it'll get upvotes.
This isn't going to stay like it is. They're working on a better system.
>> Invited reposts are mostly deprecated now in favor of re-ups [1], but when it looks like the submitter might also be the author (as e.g. with Show HNs), we still send them. It's nice for an author to know that their post may still get discussed, and it's good for HN when an author jumps into the thread.
