Getting trapped in the spin cycle
As minimal and simple as BearBlog is, there's one thing that, as ever, remains the same:
Acquiring readership is a popularity contest.
Have you ever looked at the Discover page?
Posts with more Likes get promoted to the top, and posts near the top get more reads... and thereby more likes... and thereby more reads... and thereby stay at the top.
There is a decay rate, so sitting at the top isn't indefinite but...
The closer you are to the top, the easier it is to stay there.
How often do you scroll past the first page?
(This is a link where you can tell me. I genuinely want to know.)(I think the highest any of my posts has been was page 4.)
I check the discover page once or twice a month. Any more than that and I find I'm scrolling past too many purple links, posts I've already read.
Now, I'm not going to beg for likes. (I've never been particularly good at calls-to-actions, nor liked how they taste on my tongue.) I genuinely couldn't care less about likes.
All I've ever wanted was to be read.
Unfortunately, likes are a driver to expand readership.
(I sure as hell ain't getting it from my social media presence, which is filtered and tailored and limited, the opposite of what I should be doing if I wanted to drive readership.)
There's a stacked pair of carats(^) at the bottom of this page, if you didn't know. That's the Like button.
I'm not asking you to touch it, I just want to make sure you know where it is, on the off chance that you do want to click it.
Leave a comment or continue reading: other Friday posts, more writing meta.
