What do users mean by "this blew up more than I expected" edits?

This is a well-recognized Reddit cliché: a poster adds an edit to their original text acknowledging that the post received far more attention — upvotes, awards, comments, or crosspost shares — than they anticipated when they wrote it. The edit typically reads something like "Edit: wow, this blew up more than I expected! Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!" and became so common that it generated its own layer of ironic commentary and mockery. The edit serves a few purposes, some social and some vanity-driven. On the social side, acknowledging viral success can feel like gratitude — the poster is expressing surprise and appreciation rather than acting entitled to the attention. On the vanity side, the edit draws fresh eyes to the fact that the post is popular, which can itself generate more engagement. It also serves as a timestamp that distinguishes the post before it went viral from the version that attracted scrutiny, potentially softening critical responses by framing the original as a casual thought rather than a considered public statement. Reddit culture has long treated these edits as eyeroll-worthy, particularly in combination with "thanks for the gold, kind stranger!" — a phrase so overused that it became a meme in itself, regularly parodied in shitposting communities. The self-congratulatory quality of pointing out your own viral success conflicts with Reddit's nominal preference for humility and community-oriented behavior. Automod bots in some subreddits remove comments containing phrases like "kind stranger" as a result. The underlying phenomenon is real, though: genuinely surprised viral moments do happen, and some posters did not expect their casual observation to reach hundreds of thousands of people. The cliché has simply been deployed so often, and so insincerely, that the phrase has become a marker of performative humility rather than the genuine article.