A reliable way for an article do do well on social media is to be fun to argue about, or to be supporting evidence in a broader ongoing argument. In this case,

A reliable way for an article do do well on social media is to be fun to argue about, or to be supporting evidence in a broader ongoing argument. In this case, there is a broad ongoing argument about Google and its products [jumping the shark/being evil]. That argument is so much fun that, as I write this, almost every single top-level comment in this thread is a salvo in that argument, only tenuously connected to the OP. This article is just a convenient place to have the argument. (I have a personal learning experience here: The first article of mine that hit the HN front page was a writeup of a PyCon talk entitled "To Make the World Better, Remove Some Javascript from it"[0]. It also shot to the top within minutes, and was [defensibly] flagged off the front page very quickly, because the title alone immediately turned it into a place to argue about JS [not] being evil, rather than discuss the Python-to-Javascript compiler I was talking about. Suffice it to say that subsequent articles have been more modestly titled!) [0] https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk https://anvil.works/blog/pycon-talk