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Comment by ajnin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, this video has been consistently pushed to me by the YouTube recommendation algorithm for the past 3 weeks. It looks like the recommender pressure is so strong it's influencing HN headlines.

View on HN

It's also the #2 post on www.reddit.com/r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15kg058/til_...

Is there some kind of coordinated push to get this story out everywhere?

Probably more like a burst of views on a video boosts it in the algorithm.

Which causes more people to watch it, which increases the odds someone posts it to a different site and also increases the odds someone on that third site has already seen it and comments, etc. etc. A big surge in one site can affect multiple sites pretty easily, especially if they share a large proportion of their user base and/or users can easily bounce between them even if they're not regular users of one or the other. It's kind of tin foil hat territory to assume it's a "coordinated push" and not just how "the algorithm" + the internet works in general.

Indeed, it's not called "viral content" for nothing!

Its an interesting story that checks some boxes (michael jordan is still 11/10 popular, big organization refuses to pay, etc)... and the story is fairly brief... and has a good ending. I think the algorithm is just doing its thing.

I think instead it's that of the tens thousands of people who saw the video recently, maybe one of them posts it on reddit, and another posts it on HN.

This is a common phenomenon, exactly like how the kid making the shot made similar contests more popular.

It's an interesting story. Either OP watched the documentary and then posted the story, or an acquaintance of OP watched the documentary and then sent the article to OP.

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