Member-only story
Did Ya Read More Than The First Sentence?
No? That’s okay. I’d love to have your opinion anyway
I’ve had experience with viral posts in the past. The biggest and most unpleasant was from my old aplawrence.com tech site.
It wasn’t at all unusual for that site to see 200–300,000 unique visitors every month. I forget where it ranked in Alexa, but I remember it being under 60,000 worldwide at one time and under 17,000 in the United States. Not exactly a household name, but pretty powerful nonetheless.
I sold off the site last year because it had slowly sunk into oblivion as the Unix product I wrote about there faded into disuse.
So when I had a really popular post, it was big. But one thing I noticed very quickly was that the big ones were usually because something I said pissed off a lot of people. People seem to spread things they hate much more than things they like!
Slashdot!
The biggest one was great fun. I cannot remember now what it was about, but somebody with a big Slashdot following seems to have read the first few sentences, totally misunderstood my opinion, and decided that I was more than a jackass.
