Ask HN: When a post of yours does well, do you know why?

1 point by john_builds 57 minutes ago

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?

ymolodtsov 55 minutes ago

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.