21 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek OP 31 May \ parent \ on: First Comment Wins (Almost) meta
One could collect measurements of the time you hit reply vs the timestamp that shows up to find out how early you need to be but there is jitter, clock skew and drift so I think it would still be mostly random.
That’s what I figured from MiddleWay’s comment.
Still, someone should be able to greatly improve their odds compared to my 1/1,000 if they put some thought into it.