The results surprised me.

*The Numbers*

- Negative sentiment: 78 articles (49%) - Positive sentiment: 45 articles (28%) - Neutral: 36 articles (23%)

Negative content doesn't just perform well – it dominates.

*What "Negative" Actually Means*

The viral negative posts weren't toxic or mean. They were:

- Exposing problems ("Why I mass-deleted my Chrome extensions") - Challenging giants ("OpenAI's real business model") - Honest failures ("I wasted 3 years building the wrong thing") - Uncomfortable truths ("Your SaaS metrics are lying to you")

The pattern: something is broken and here's proof.

*Title Patterns That Worked*

From the 159 viral posts, these structures appeared repeatedly:

1. [Authority] says [Controversial Thing] - 23 posts 2. Why [Common Belief] is Wrong - 19 posts 3. I [Did Thing] and [Unexpected Result] - 31 posts 4. [Company] is [Doing Bad Thing] - 18 posts

Average title length: 8.3 words. The sweet spot is 6-12 words.

*What Didn't Work*

Almost none of the viral posts were: - Pure product launches - "I'm excited to announce..." - Listicles ("10 ways to...") - Generic advice

*The Uncomfortable Implication*

If you want reach on HN, you're better off writing about what's broken than what you built.

This isn't cynicism – it's selection pressure. HN readers are skeptics. They've seen every pitch. What cuts through is useful criticism backed by evidence.

*For Founders*

Before your next launch post, ask: what problem am I exposing? What assumption am I challenging? What did I learn the hard way?

That's your hook.

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Data: Built a tool that snapshots HN/GitHub/Reddit/ProductHunt every 30 minutes. Analyzed 1,576 snapshots, found 2,984 instances of score=100, deduped to 159 unique URLs, crawled 143 successfully, ran GPT-4 sentiment analysis on full article text.

Happy to share the raw data if anyone wants to dig deeper.