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If you're going to share a Google doc to Hacker News and it reaches the front page, don't leave 'comments mode' on and go to the gym...

If you're going to share a Google doc to Hacker News and it reaches the front page, don't leave 'comments mode' on and go to the gym...

You'll be in for a big surprise when you check your phone 😅

on May 14, 2019
  1. 2

    lol! how many comments? please tell me Google grouped all of those in a single (or few) email...

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      about 400 in the ~20mins before I noticed and cut it off...

      Yep, were grouped into about 3-4 emails thank god

  2. 2

    Haha, do share :)

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      The document is here - i deleted the comments though :)

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        Curious to see the hackernews link/thread, how many upvotes led to that many comments?

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          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19909226

          As far as I can tell, this is what happened...

          1. It got about ~50 points in the first few minutes, jumped onto the front page
          2. Getting on the homepage means all sorts of HN twitter bots retweet the link
          3. One of them was picked up by a Trump supporter/MAGA network of Twitter bots and shared a few times on Twitter in those circles (100s of thousands of followers each, mostly bots probably)
          4. Some MAGA supporters jumped into the comments on the Google doc and added a load of pro Trump/anti Joe Biden rhetoric (amongst other rubbish)
          5. That lead to the HN post being flagged (rightly so) by quite a few users and disappearing from the front page to position ~200 or so...
          6. All that happened in about 20 minutes!
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            Oh, wow, didn't see the Trump stuff coming!

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            wow, amazing sequence of events! haha

  3. 1

    How many viewers did you get in total on that doc due to being on HN?

    1. 1

      No idea. Don't think you can see total viewer numbers for a gdoc...