A certain simplicity.

There is a simplicity that is pure genius, and then there is the noise of everyone trying to sound like geniuses

It’s like some people are naturally good at haiku. It’s simple, it’s catchy, if you can pull it off without being obviously wrong it is pleasing.

“Keeps coming back” is the mistaken angle, “recognizes and doesn’t mind what else … has to say” is more like it.

What makes me enjoy someone's content is each [phrase-redacted].

There are quite a lot of AI's inner workings articles which make it way too complicated to understand. Few months ago, I found this article which I was able to read till the end and fully understand it:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-can-ai-id-a-cat-an-illust...

I think it's perfect example of making complex things easier to understand.

I appreciate a discussion of alternatives and historical context. Most engineers understand that literally anything that is computable can be computed on a turing-complete machine. The hard part is making the decision: why this way and not some other way? If the only tool you know is a hammer, you don't want to read about yet another way to smack a nail. You want a nail gun.

something that is genuine, not trying to game a platform.

extremely light and low, on the click like follow comment share subscribe mantra.

The content is what I appreciate about content I appreciate.

What grabs my attention is entirely different…a combination of “the algorithm,” “the author,” “the clickbait,” and my mood/current interest.

What keeps me coming back is the author and my mood. A para-social relationship. At the general scale of viral, almost nothing viral gets my sustained interest…I mean I am here on HN after all.

But for clarification, I appreciate a lot of things I don’t enjoy or like. Something can be both good and not for me…indeed, I am not the audience for most good things.

And that’s the thing. Things go viral with an audience. Virality is a relationship to a specific audience not an inherent property of the text/content/artifact.

If you want to make something viral either make something tuned for a specific audience or make something and let it find its audience. In either case you have to make something.

Authenticity.

I - and an estimated 40K+ people - gladly pay $120 a year to read and listen to Ben Thompson of Stratechery. His posts and interviews are top notch and his podcasts are one of the few to take advantage of chapter art to illustrate what he is talking about.

The coolness.

I consume the coolest content possible. The being cool is when somebody with enough taste tells that this is cool. What is the taste - if the most expensive jacket you have costs $1000 than you will never distinguish the $10000 jacket from $100000 jacket. So many words to explain the one-word answer.