Unlike Reddit, on HN there is no "knights of new" subculture of random people reading and voting new submissions. Most of us only look at the front page and maybe 1-2 more pages (mainly because of the defective pagination). That said, there are 2 ways to get your submission on the front page:
- get enough friends to vote it
- be the first to submit a popular link and receive automated upvotes each time someone else tries to submit the same link
My previous “successful” submissions follow the same pattern. And I have a lot of “unsuccessful” submissions with 1 or 2 points. It’s a pity because I still think that some of them are very interesting.
I think that a very important factor is just to have luck and get a few upvotes in the fist minutes.
For newly added posts you have to go to the "new" page and upvote from there. If you're passing around a link to the direct post to get upvotes you're assumed to be part of a voting ring and your votes are ignored with respect to being promoted to the home page.
- get enough friends to vote it
- be the first to submit a popular link and receive automated upvotes each time someone else tries to submit the same link