When something I write gets an unusual amount of attention, I can always produce an explanation afterwards. Hook, timing, format, topic, the audience being in the right mood. But I can produce an explanation for the ones that got no attention too, which makes me suspect I am pattern matching on noise.

For those of you who post regularly, in any venue: do you think you know what causes the outliers? And has anyone managed to reproduce one deliberately?

Why don’t you answer that for me. My outlier for today was this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49121138

What made that one special?

I never expected this one to be upvoted well over 100 times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849520

Is this a fact finding journey to help your AI 'social media' startup?

It's a function of title of submission and time of submission.

Sometimes you post at the right time for people to see it and it gathers enough attention to hit the front page. Once it's on the front page, and if it's a really good submission, it can stay there for hours.

But, you really can't tell which submission will be a hit or not. The ones you're certain will blow up can go unnoticed.

To be honest, no. In fact, the posts that I thought would be the most interesting don't get much attention.

It's something I drafted in a single evening that suddenly gets into top-3 traffic acquirers for my blog.