Does reposting a link work?
Links that missed first time reach 100 points on a later try 9.17% of the time against 5.2% generally — and why that gap is not advice.
Data through 2026-07-28
Roughly one Hacker News link in eight is submitted more than once. The obvious question is whether the second try helps, and the archive can compare the two rates — as long as it is honest about what the comparison is worth.
Since 2019, 5.2% of submissions reached 100 points. Among the 238,904 links whose first outing missed that mark and were posted again, 9.17% eventually reached it — about 1.76× the general rate. The typical gap before the next attempt is 3.0 days, and the attempt that lands is usually the second.
Why this is not advice
Resubmitted links are chosen, not sampled: somebody judged a story worth another go. This compares how reposted links fare against links generally; it does not measure what reposting does to a link, and this data cannot.
Put concretely: to read 9.17% as the return on reposting, the links people choose to repost would have to be no better than the ones they do not. They almost certainly are better — that is what choosing means. The honest statement is that reposted links outperform links in general, and that the archive cannot separate how much of that is the second posting and how much is the judgement that preceded it.
Method
Stories since 2019 with a URL, excluding dead and deleted. Submissions of the same URL are grouped and ordered by time; a link counts as retried when its first submission stayed under 100 points, and as landed when a later one reached it. The baseline is the share of all submissions in the same window that reached 100.
Scope is 2019 onward: recent enough to describe Hacker News as it works now. Figures are published as resubmission.json; see the methodology.