Why are you literally spamming HN with your own posts?
It is not intellectually interesting.
This taught me that HN is a great distribution channel for my content, however since that one time I have never managed to get any traction.
What would you suggest?
When you had a popular post, were you trying to gain traction more or less than you are now?
Anyway, my take is that things take off because they strike a chord with readers.
They just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
So mostly, traction is the result of other people's lives, not the author's intent. Sure the author's hard work plays some role. But traction only has a very loose correlation to it in regard to any specific story.
Over time a lot of hard work writing probably has a stronger correlation to the degree the writing gets better...for some arbitrary definition of better.
Seems like substack = good, medium = bad