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Remember when going viral actually meant something real?
I was thinking back to 2017 when I had this one comment on a friend's post that blew up. A guy I've never met replied to it and we ended up in a thread for 3 days just talking about how algorithms were already shifting things. He told me "the feed doesn't care about your story, it cares about seconds of attention." That stuck with me because now I see how everything is optimized for that one quick scroll. Has anyone else had a random internet conversation that changed how you see the algorithm game?
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fisher.thomas14d ago
Pull the bait early. A solid hook in the first two words can stop a thumb faster than a whole paragraph ever will.
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That quote about the feed caring about seconds of attention hits hard because it's dead on. I've seen it play out in real time with my own page. The trick I use now is to front load everything. Put the main point in the first sentence or even the first few words. Nobody reads past the preview anymore. If you can make someone stop mid scroll with a single line, you might get 2 more seconds out of them. That's the whole game now. You're not writing for people to read. You're writing to interrupt their finger.
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kai_burns7314d ago
Yeah but you’re still fighting the algorithm on its own terms. Real talk, the only way to win is to stop caring about the seconds entirely. Make people want to stick around because of who you are, not because you tricked them.
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