[tjchear]

I actually have a different hypothesis. There's no cap on interesting stories, but rather there's a cap on how long a submission can be noticed. The more submissions there are being posted, the faster existing submissions drop off the first couple new post pages, where people might see them. If a post can't stay long enough to be noticed, people might just elect to hold off posting until the new post space becomes less crowded.

[mooreds]

I am not sure about this, because if so, then you'd see submissions at a constant rate.

But they tend to cluster around business hours Pacific: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective

I've posted on Sunday and the new page is super slow then.

It might be a function of the number of submissions + the number of people available to upvote them (both increase during the work week and decrease on the weekend).

[toomuchtodo]

Attention contention.