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A couple weeks ago, a post of mine went unexpectedly viral on Threads. As of this writing, it has been viewed 2,380,872 times. This is what I wrote:
To which Noah replied:
And then I wrote:
I did not expect it to be any more popular than any other silly thing I might post on Threads. But for some reason it resonated with people. It might have been the wholesome topic in troubling times. A lot of people replied sharing pictures of their own trees, or commenting that they’d be back on June 9 for Noah’s update.
A lot of people wrote that they were leaving a comment in the belief that engaging would make the algorithm more likely to show them any update that happens on June 9. And of course, when people engaged with the post, that made the algorithm more likely to show it to more people, and it snowballed over the day.
I think people were also amused by the timescale of the reply. Five years is a long time to wait before replying to someone. When I got my reminder about Noah’s trees, I vaguely remembered having set it, but I certainly hadn’t given it any thought since then. Five years passed but I only thought about it on two of those days: the first day and the last day. So it was a very low-effort win.
But Noah is really the master of long scale projects.
You may remember him from his viral “Everyday” video, which he posted in 2006, featuring photos of himself taken every day. He had been doing it for six years already at that point, and unbelievably he is still doing it. Here’s his updated version after 20 years:
Noah has other long-scale projects, too. He revisits the same spots and takes the same photos over time, like his Lumberland series, or his photos of a stone wall near his home, or this one tree that’s growing diagonally.
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