> I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad
Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.
Ha, this is a common way to get on the frontpage of Hacker News.
I wonder if is a special case of "surprise" - things that are surprising have more information value, and people react to information.
There's also the aspect of something being wrong - if something is wrong, people want to correct it - often angrily if the source advancing the wrong viewpoint is obstinate - and that's engagement.
I wonder if both of those can be teased out. Like, if something is surprising and correct, what's the engagement of that? That probably doesn't drive engagement as much as surprising and wrong.