Thinking about that incident, I realised that lightweight self-help posts is probably the only category of content for which that kind of stunt could work, part

Thinking about that incident, I realised that lightweight self-help posts is probably the only category of content for which that kind of stunt could work, partly because the copy of such articles is so generic that it can be (somewhat plausibly) machine-generated, but also because all you need is a sufficiently baity headline, and a whole lot of people will react to it and write comments about their reactions, without even reading the article. That was an important but mostly-overlooked aspect of that event; the title wasn't machine generated, and for many or even most of the commenters, the title was evidently all they read. Seems like a good reason to keep such posts of HN.