You Probably Don't Want to "Go Viral" in Toxic Social Control Media
Social Control Media - most of it at least - is a bit like a subculture or cult, typically controlled by some malicious corporation or notoriously bigoted (at least narcissistic) oligarch. In the case of "Hacker News", for instance, what we deal with is Social Control Media controlled by scammers and charlatans. They misuse the term "Hacker" to sound edgy and the word "News" is misplaced; the oligarchs over there get to decide what is (or isn't) news based on their personal (corporate) agenda.
"Hackers" are programmers who 'hack on' (change) code and rely on the code being free/libre. They're not crackers, they're not a subset of malicious actors, and it oftentimes feels like the people who run "Hacker News" are malicious, i.e. business crackers who crack down on digital populism and weed out criticism of large corporations.
"Hacker News" traffic is no blessing or godsend. In our experience, it invites abuse, heckling, and low-quality comments that are time-wasting at best.
Good news sites do not strive to go "viral" but to be consistently good, irrespective of "traffic". They don't "optimise" their words for online hubs ("algospeak"), they focus on what truly matters. █