I got 100k views in 24 hrs from a tweet about operating systems internals

I'm an odd indie hacker. I make content about technical computer science topics. Mostly operating systems internals. I don't make revenue but am building an audience.

I had success this week and wanted to share my learnings about writing viral content for niche audience.

About me: I'm obsessed with a specific topic in computer science — virtual memory. You'd think it would be way too niche to ever take flight, but I've had significant traction from it. (This is the third viral content about this)

The biggest thing I've learned about writing for twitter is that specific word choice and phrasing really matters.

Especially for the things I write about, I've found that I need to nail a sweet spot between:

• Not too niche — Ideally not about a specific programming language
• Plausibly useful — It should be plausible that someone might be able to use this in their work or job
• Rare or unique knowledge — Best if not many others are talking about it
• It needs to be retweet optimized — Really write so that you can see someone wanting to retweet or share this

Somehow "Linux virtual memory" seems to nail it. I've played with other ideas and this has been the best performing.

Here are the exact tweets that went viral.

"linux virtual memory fun fact of the day:

after a fork+exec to run a subshell, a parent process will page fault on every first write to every single writable page in its address space"

In this case, I chose "linux virtual memory fun fact of the day:" as the tweet intro. This is the RT optimized part of it.

I considered stuff like "TIL" but I didn't think that's quite as RT able.

Then I have a highly technical sentence. A thread follows, but with no thread emoji or mention of a thread. I think the technical nature makes people click.

"New kernel post! This time: /proc/*/mem and how it writes to unwritable mem.

Key takeaway: By walking page tables in software, the kernel can access userspace mem without directly dereferencing pointers it gets from userspace. (No WP/SMAP bits involved)."

"New blog! Sharing some nuances of the Linux kernel's virtual memory implementation and a cute mmap trick that's great for parties 😎

(plus this fun cartoon I drew!!👨‍🎨)"

• Saying "New post" seemed to work for these. I linked out to my blog here.
• Also using a highly technical sentence in the first one
• In the second one I bait with this "cute trick" they can learn

The audience (based on bios of new followers) is mostly:

• beginner, enthusiast programmers
• students
• information security/hacker community
• occasionally some skilled experts

I don't really know where to go from this, but it's good traction.

The easy answer is probably an info-product of some kind. Or if I were really desperate for money, I could sell my time and probably get at least a few consulting call clients.

Cheers,
Mark