Help Me Understand Why This Post is Going ‘Viral’

C. Dorian Carlone
3 min readMar 4, 2023

My views are up and I don’t know why.

AI Generated Surrealist Image of ‘realistic guitar player’

You hear about people’s posts getting picked up by the algorithm and going viral. This is the closest I’ve come to experiencing such a thing, and I completely don’t get it.

In April of 2022 I published an article in The Writing Collective on how writers need to get used to letting go of control of their readers’ thoughts and begin allowing them them have their own feelings about what we write. It’s got more views than anything I’ve ever published.

How Are We as Writers to Elicit Certain Thoughts From Our Readers: And Will It Backfire On Us if We Try? was immediately distributed by Medium, the first of my articles to be selected for distribution in a while.

If you look at the graph below you can see that a handful of people looked at the article when it first got published.

I didn’t share it to social media because I didn’t think my personal friends would be interested in my writing about writing. So this is purely organic viewing here.

Suddenly, and inexplicably, my numbers are up!

--

--

C. Dorian Carlone

Aspiring novelist, sometimes nutritionist, fledgling minimalist. Hobby musician and lover of disc golf. Join and support: cdoriancarlone.medium.com/membership