[gmac]

Not true, sadly. In my experience there is a big element of luck, and the headline matters a lot.

For example, my most popular ever submission (1341 upvotes) didn't get a single upvote when I submitted 4 months earlier under a slightly different headline.

[KomoD]

Of course title matters, and your title wasn't "slightly different", it was very different.

"See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS" - repost

"Annotated Live TLS 1.3 Session" - original

The reposted title was way more interesting

[gmac]

Well, yes and no. I’d say the new headline was very similar content, albeit pitched a bit differently. :)

I usually try not to repost, because I think it’s rightly frowned on, but I do have a few less extreme examples where the exact same post got to the front page a second time after sinking without trace the first. It seems kind of obvious that the timeline of the first few upvotes is critical, and somewhat random.

[sabrina_ramonov]

This is why, in marketing, you'll hear mantras like "spend 80% of your time writing the hook (title)"