So, the weird thing about leaving social media is that you lose the metrics that let you know if you’re being interesting. Or if Mark Zuckerberg can use your post to elect evil politicians, which of course, is a problem with the platform.
The other problem being the addiction.
In the absence of this feedback, I end up writing what is more or less a diary of my own attempts at bettering myself, being more productive, mixed with memoire and commentary, kinda what I did with FB, but minus the politics. Of course, there was also the stuff I wrote inspired by other people in my feed, and the replies.
I find myself wanting to build this blog into something addictive, with more feedback, rising subscription numbers, greater reach, and more researched articles and pieces, more polished memoire… but again, I got out of FB in large part to write more fiction, or maybe business writing or creative non-fiction that paid more money, and do less conversational typing.
The conversational typing, I think, has slowly impacted my fictional voices, creating something that approximates effortless reading. So maybe it’s worth something.
Anyway, feel free to comment and share, which is of course, far slower clumsier than banging an emoticon. But that’s a good thing. Because it isn’t something. you do reflexively. Some people ‘like’ every comment by a friend, to be friendly. Some people like only what moves them. Your likes is his mixed bag, like halloween candy combining horrific orange and black taffy with delightful chocolate bars. Likes are the mechanism that FB and Twitter uses to create virality, and I think, how they trigger the dangerous levels of stickiness, engagement.
Facebook wants you to spend all your time in Facebook. All of it. It’s creators knew they were exploiting weaknesses in human psychology, and did it anyway, like Big Tobacco peddling their lethal, addictive product without admitting its well-known health risks for decades. Whistle blowers have been saying this about FB for years now, but the latest whistle-blower, post Trump, seems to have finally struck the resonant chord, in the same way #metoo bubbled along below the surfaces before getting big.
The like is the way they do it, the way they tune the feed, the way europeans distilled the coca leaves which were well tolerated by native users as coffee like pick-me-up for centuries, into the white powder and crack which can destroy a life in a matter of months.
Facebook turned social media into crack.
So, don’t like my stuff, heck, you can’t, there’s no button. Don’t comment unless you feel like it, and don’t share if unless you really like the thing you’re sharing.
I see the reads, which are hits, which mean… something, even if you skim a paragraph and go away, because you cared enough about me to actually click a link, and wait a few seconds. Which is a huge barrier. Donald Trump couldn’t turn his blog into any numbers that mattered, not even with a third of the country worshipping him as a God. So this blog will never blow up. Blog’s don’t blow up.
Only crack blows up. And crack, you know, is bad for you.
Do you see reads from email? Most of the time I read the posts there. But I am reading. 🙂
I have had and may still have a service in place from something called feedburner, which Google acquired and then killed as it abandoned RSS as a technology that was too good; it basically demonetizes other products they could make money on; RSS gets rid of the need for a lot of social media. It allows places and people to curate feeds without ads. It’s most of the social media we should all be using.
Feedburner still works, I guess, but some of the UI is turned off.
I do not understand, fundmentally, what a wordpress (self hosted) subscription is, how the user administers it, (sets up for daily or digest; cancels, etc.) or how I see it (because I set it up, installed some plug ins, and didn’t see people in my lists of ‘subscribers’ who told me they had just signed up.)
I also don’t see any of my feedburner people, which may be only a few at this point.
So, it’s boring, complicated, irritating, in a way I find I have less and less patience for. But this is my punishment for leaving Facebook and wanting it’s functionality, in a world where people don’t / wont use RSS.
I don’t see reads by email at this point, no, and that’s a very good thing to remember. Thanks. If I don’t use mailchimp or something as fully featured and infuriating, I will never know about those numbers.
I need to run some tests with a fresh victim, have them use a plug-in form, and then have them click on stuff, and maybe screenshot what they see, so I have a better idea of what the fuck is going on. I see now on every comment I can click into a wordpress subscriptions options link, which shows me an obviously wordpress UI that lets me do stuff, as I am subscribed, apparently.
There is a wordpress native subscription system, which may, or may not, be RSS based, and there is RSS to email as a concept I may have gotten working with a defunct product, and there’s third party permission based email services like Mailchimp that will convert. your RSS into email; there also seem to be plug-ins, but I think maybe they plug into wordpress native ability, or into a third party service, and provide additional UI control and maybe some extra features.