It's mostly empty calories from life hacker and hacker news, so I'm not sure how pleased to actually be about it. More startling than anything
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Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness
it's a genuinely good article detailing something that a lot of folks come across without really knowing or understanding it verbally, and the folks that don't tend to have a lot of trouble!
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Replying to @mattoflambda @Meaningness
Yeah I think this is the root of why it's hard to predict popularity - a post needs to feel almost too obvious to be worth saying to do numbers like this
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Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda
My theory of tweets that go viral is “reflections that (in fact) everyone has already had, but that many people think OTHER people need to realize”
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Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not sure it works as a theory for the popularity of this blog post though - I think this is more "things that lots of people know but have never previously realised that they don't know how to articulate"
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Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda
Yes, “clear concise articulations of things people have already grasped intuitively” seems like a major category of win. (That’s kind of the Lifehacker formula, I think? I’ve never read it.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda
Yeah, indeed. And I'm not sure RE lifehacker. Certainly plausible! I also don't really read it, though I think I've occasionally read posts that have come up in google searches.
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Oh and yeah a fairly dry didactic style seems to do surprisingly well in terms of popularity. "Here let me teach you something" is probably a refreshing change from the rest of the internet.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda
Yes my two most-viewed posts (Kegan; history of meditation) are both extremely dull. I guess if I cared more about stats I’d write more textbook-style summaries of obscure topics that I know well. I deliberately de-academicized my writing for the web; perhaps that was mistaken!
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Replying to @Meaningness
Digression: I couldn't find the history of meditation. Link?
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