Essential Elements of Timeless Posting

How many men to kill the gorilla?

There are certain vectors of online content that seem to always generate a response from people. Now matter how many variations of the theme have been spread over the years, they continue to spark discussion.

In this post we’ll go through some iconic examples, but the core elements of all of them are as follows.

• Ambiguity: No clear answer, so everyone feels qualified to weigh in.

• Emotion: Triggers curiosity, outrage, or pride, compelling people to react.

• Simplicity: Easy to grasp in seconds, like a single image or question.

• Engagement: Invites comments, shares, or polls, fueling social media algorithms.

Order of Operations / PEMDAS Problems

If you want to tap in to mass appeal, 5th grade math is a great place to begin. Anything more advanced and you start losing the room.

Such great questions as “do you sum contents of the parenthesis first?” have challenged the minds of Facebook boomers for decades now.

S-tier PEMDAS content is typically met with an exasperation along the lines “83% of people get this answer wrong”, leading the commenter to feel a sense of satisfaction if they get the problem correct. Bonus points if the equation is written in a needlessly ambiguous/complex manner.

Hypothetical Battles

This one caters more to the male gaze, but is another enduring staple of online discussion.

Men love to debate any “who would win in a fight?” scenario. Could be football teams, MMA fighters, eagles vs. apes, 1 giant duck vs. 100 duck sized gorillas and so on. Who is in the battle matters much less than the fact there is indeed a battle and we must determine the victor.

There used to be a whole TV series Deadliest Warrior which attempted to pit figures from history in hypothetical bouts and decide through rigorous analysis who would be the victor. Ran 3 seasons, spawned many spinoffs, and was a one of the better successes for the network. It’s a classic formula.

Visual Illusions or Ambiguous Images

The greatest online optical illusion debate was probably that photo of a dress from 2015. Was the dress white and gold? Was it actually blue and black? Would someone really wear this dress out? The debate raged on for months, brands hopped on to the trend to try and promote their products.

At the core of most of these types of viral content is the “incredulous notion” that people view the world differently. Like the infamous “how would you feel if you had not eaten breakfast this morning?” counterfactual, large percentages of the population seem to struggle to comprehend this sort of theory of mind.

Arbitrary Classifications

Is cereal a soup? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is toast bread?

Nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative. It gets the people going.

These sort of classification games can quickly devolve into linguistic nonsense, which is likely part of the goal. The ideal comment section is one where people are just talking past each other. Saying the same thing, or using a bunch of words to say nothing, but somehow vehemently disagreeing with each other.

Nostalgia Posting

Does anyone else remember the ‘90s? Remember when things used to be like [X}?

Tony Soprano famously said “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation”. Even if he was correct in his assessment (I tend to disagree) it turns out it is still a wildly popular form of conversation. People love bonding over their shared memories. There is a real universality to nostalgia that connects on an emotional level.

Recently on Twitter, I find the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia are turned up to an almost nauseating degree. Maybe because the prominent accounts on the site are now aging millennials, there is this habit to over-romanticize the past.

Guys will post stuff like “remember when we would go to Blockbuster and pick out from a small selection video tapes, and then have to rewind them and drive back there 5 days later to avoid late fees. The good ole days!” and get tens of thousands of likes.

Even if the past may have been better in many regards, we don’t have to pretend it was superior in all ways. It’s a bit sad watching these folks try to circle the drain, yearning to go back to a vision of a past that never really existed.

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Some more content honorable mentions:

• Trolley problems / moral dilemmas

• “Which one?” (w/ attached photo of 2+ women)

• Anything pertaining to commonly eaten food

• Totally arbitrary superlatives (e.g. “What’s the most overrated city?”)