Why don’t you answer that for me. My outlier for today was this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49121138

What made that one special?

I never expected this one to be upvoted well over 100 times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849520

It's a function of title of submission and time of submission.

Sometimes you post at the right time for people to see it and it gathers enough attention to hit the front page. Once it's on the front page, and if it's a really good submission, it can stay there for hours.

But, you really can't tell which submission will be a hit or not. The ones you're certain will blow up can go unnoticed.

Is this a fact finding journey to help your AI 'social media' startup?

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.