Flu vaccination linked to 40% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease

I posted this exact link two days ago. What gives?

I wouldn't think anything nefarious happened. A few possibilities:

* You posted it during a time of day when the site receives less traffic, and it scrolled too far down or off the New page for people to see it and vote it up. (Looks like you posted during lunch time on the US west coast, so maybe this isn't likely.)

* When you posted, there was other big news or something going on that people were absorbed in, and didn't notice your post.

* Some don't visit HN multiple times a day, and perhaps you just got unlucky that many of the people who would have found this interesting didn't see it 2 days ago, but did happen to be around today.

* Your account was created three days ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if HN doesn't weight upvotes on new-account submissions as highly as for older accounts. Also consider that your first submission (the day before) was flagged and killed; that might put you in a time-limited penalty box. (I don't know any of this for a fact, as I have no idea how HN's software works, but it seems plausible.)

* Just dumb luck. I've made a bunch of submissions that I thought were interesting (and though would appeal to a wide variety of HN readers/commenters), but it just turned out that it wasn't the case. Maybe it was just timing or something else.

I believe the mods have stated that HN allows duplicate links within a shorter-than-normal time period if the previous posting didn't get much attention, so it's perhaps not surprising that the software allowed the repost.

There's a lot of randomness in what gets attention on /newest. Your submission didn't get attention while this one did.

HN disallows reposts within 8 hours or if a story has had significant attention in the last year, but neither of those were the case with this repost, so our software allowed it to go through.

I know it's frustrating when your submission 'loses' and someone else's 'wins', but since it's random, it at least evens out in the long run if you submit lots of good stories. Eventually we'll implement some sort of karma sharing to take care of this.

> * You posted it during a time of day when the site receives less traffic, and it scrolled too far down or off the New page for people to see it and vote it up. (Looks like you posted during lunch time on the US west coast, so maybe this isn't likely.)

Looks like it's UTC, so early Saturday morning vs after lunch Monday.

> * When you posted, there was other big news or something going on that people were absorbed in, and didn't notice your post.

Roe v Wade