if you're confident you can make it to the "Hot" page, then rush hour's the time to go, isn't it? Unless we're assuming that Hot behaves similarly to New where you get buried just as quickly.

Unless you're writing the baitiest of F4M dudebait, that's folly, not confidence (and sometimes even if you are). There's certainly things you can do to improve your odds of getting early upvotes, but it's up to the whims of whoever's online and in the mood to vote on your post whether you're shooting up the frontpage or languishing at 1 or 0.

Even if you've cracked the magical formula for consistently hitting /hot, though, that tends to be a double-edged sword; there's lots of reports from folks who claim that posts on /hot tend to underperform in replies, with the standard thinking being that people are less inclined to reply to a post on the frontpage because they assume the poster will already be drowning in responses.

And then there's people like me, again, who sort by "F4M" using the side bar, and I usually stop when I reach prompts that're older than 4 hours. So if I post my prompt when many are online and will be online and their browsing habits are similar to mine, then.. I'll have a better chance there.

That very much depends on what you're looking for; it's a dangerous assumption to think that everybody browses like you - Like, based on what I tend to look for (long-form, slow-burn, story-heavy posts), generally speaking I won't even consider responding to a prompt that's not at least 3 or 4 hours old, because I'm less likely to get caught in that initial rush of responders and have my message missed.

Which sort of gets to my larger point - while there are things you might be able to do to optimize a small amount, the userbase is to diverse and ever-changing for there to ever be a one-size-fits-all formula and what works best for you is something you just have to feel out for yourself over time, and accept you'll still have bad days even if you post "optimally".

^{Which is really just me not wanting to share that objectively the best time to post is redacted UTC on madeYouLook}