p.s. if you don't mind, could you please put your email address in your profile? That way we can send you a repost invite in the future, which is the way we do this if the post is older than a few days. And even if it's not that old, we sometimes still email a heads-up.
The frequency of using that workaround is telling how much valuable content gets under the radar of the HN hivemind. If a submission is 1) not about FAANG, entrepreneurship, programming language du jour, current events, or HN's idols or 2) is posted from the wrong time zone - it's often dead on arrival. I mean, there are counterexamples on the frontpage, but it's only a tip of the iceberg compared to what you can get in /new after filtering all the spam and fluff.
HN implicitly positions itself as "the smarter Reddit" but in my experience most subreddits of value don't have strong time zone bias. Anything that doesn't force me to post in the "SV programmers are slacking off" time window and compete for attention with a bazillion other posts would be welcome.
You're certainly right that the submission stream here includes a lot of gems that get overlooked, and that the second-chance pool is a workaround for that—and far from a complete solution. But I think you're overinterpreting the reasons for this ("not about FAANG", "wrong time zone", "SV slacking off", etc.) - one could come up with all sorts of possible such reasons and without data they're all basically just-so stories.
In the absence of specific evidence about specific factors, the simplest explanation is that it's just the way the medium works. By "the medium" I mean the large open internet forum, which HN is an instance of. Stuff routinely gets overlooked. To do something about this, we need countervailing mechanisms. The second-chance pool is the most successful one we've tried so far. I still want to extend the review process to the community at large, and I'm still not sure how quite to do that.
This is a tech/business site operated by a startup incubator. The things in the first category (entrepreneurship, new/popular technologies, prominent persons) come with the territory. They are the subjects that the primary audience wants (and has historically wanted) to discuss and keep apprised of.
What I find frustrating is the influx of people who come to a tech/business site with the primary goal of arguing politics. By my recollection, this started to get bad five(ish) years ago, and got out of control with the onset of the pandemic.
Perceptions about this get distorted by hindsight bias a lot, or whatever the bias is that makes it feel like things are always getting worse. From my perspective the mix is not so different than it used to be, and most of the differences have to do with the ocean we're all swimming in (i.e. the world at large) rather than HN itself.
