Thanks @dang for posting the # of comments. The exact same content received only a few comments whenever it was posted, but once received 84 comments! What happ

Thanks @dang for posting the # of comments. The exact same content received only a few comments whenever it was posted, but once received 84 comments! What happened that time which didn’t happen other times? Among other things the list you posted illustrates a counterpoint I often made — that engagement on HN is often not due to how compelling the actual content posted is but rather is highly dependent on “group contagion” or serendipitous factors, like a few people coming to comment and upvote early on. That’s why there is a large incentive for people to “astroturf” their first few comments and votes, by asking friends to upvote, or something. Having posted on HN since 2009 without any such “cheating” I have seen it get harder to “go viral” than in the past, it’s basically the Red Queen theory. I also noticed that posting long videos or long thoughtful articles that take a while to read results in far less chance of it being upvoted — by the time people finish reading it, it has been “outcompeted” by shorter and more shallow content - because more people come back and upvote it sooner, so the algorithm prioritizes it. I would suggest A/B testing other algorithms for ranking on HN, like Google did with their search engine, rather than just using pagerank as a single signal.