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Comment by stevage | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn between "nice writeup" and "ugh, a guide to making viral content on HN?"

Reminds me of guides for selling something online with say, craigslist. There is probably a specific day of the week, or time of day you should post. There is a way to describe your product. There is a title you should use. Maybe you should give a phone number, maybe not. Maybe you should use the craiglist email redirection.

But in some way, I hope people don't do that with hn. I sometimes read helpful product reviews on an amazon product. "I tried the XIWSHDX salad spinner, and I found it to be very useful. blah blah."

I think I'm afraid of "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", or possibly will just hide good organic content.

Yes, fair point!

I tried to reflect on some lessons from this, because I learned from the experience that small things (e.g. the title) can make large differences.

Which means that often good ideas or nice articles might get unrecognized, because they lack a good "packaging".

Making sure those things are on point helps.

But that should be it.

Being viral, for content, is not always bad: it can make an otherwise boring or tedious subject engaging and enjoyable (and on the other side, a fun subject might appear boring if badly written), which I think is what this article is about :-).

The title "I've acquired a new superpower" might have the most virality, but it's not a great title for users. Chasing viral content doesn't have to be bad, but you do often get this imbalance between clicks vs UX.

I thought superpower was fitting when I read it, back when the referenced post was originally posted. I was already familiar with optical illusions that you cross your eyes to see some kind of shape emerge in 2.5D

But I had never heard of using that same trick to solve puzzles where you find how two pictures differ. And I tried it out and it worked for me.

It took something I had limited application for and turned it into a slightly less limited power. And a great party trick. That’s sort of a superpower :D

I don't mind a "viral" title for a good article (not those kind of "You won't believe what this woman did to..." or other clearly clickbait titles), but of course, you don't know before clicking if it's a good article, or a clickbait one, indeed.

In this case though, it's a dude posting on his own blog. I'm fine with whatever title he found cool.

One just needs to write "LLM" to get the same effect ;-)

at this point in time, but the rule is too specific.

"One just needs to write $currentTrendingFad to get the same effect"

Not too long ago it could have been crypto/blockchain, or rewriting $app in $lang

That's the thing of viral is it is just trend following, so recognizing the trend helps the changes of going viral

The general sentiment on HN against cryptocurrency and blockchain has always been pretty negative as far as I can can remember.

A quick algolia search seems to support that too. Most of the highest voted stories about cryptocurrency and blockchain are negative news and opinions. There are a few highly voted stories about cryptocurrencies and blockchain too, but far fewer.

If you search for something specific like Bitcoin, there looks at a glance to be more positive or neutral stories with high number of votes, and still a few negative ones about that too.

You’ll often find a few positive comments on the stories though, so it’s not like everyone hates it. Not saying that. But overwhelmingly I feel that HN readers as a whole range from disinterested to actively against anything blockchain and that this has been the case for a long time.

To go viral doesn’t mean it’s always a positive reception. If you’re shopping karma points, it just takes getting people engaged and posting something that is known to grate people is the easy play. Just look at all of the drama on Wordpress. Just look at all of social media algos.

"rewriting $app in $lang" will never go out of style

They mostly don't work.

"How to growth hack HackerNews, without saying those words out loud so I wouldn't get flamed in the comments due to the nature of my audience".

And by the way, absolutely no hate to the author, I totally get it, and fairly ambivalent to it. It is what it is.

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