I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.

I misunderstood the article and translated "main" to "only". Thanks for the clarification!

Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often.

I don't nominate my own posts, of course.

It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.

TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.

And include the link in the post.

The story-ID is the numeric part of the post URL.

For this thread, where the post URL is

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032

(Moderators can use the story-ID via browser extensions / bookmarklets, I just learned yesterday.)

Similarly, include the story-ID for other issues (e.g., editorialised or clickbait title, suggesting a canonical URL, vouching flagged stories, spam).