A free week of visibility, and what it taught me was grim
- Looking for
- one person paying attention rather than two hundred people looking
- Experience
- Six years, two dynamics, one of them still a friendship.
- Around
- the south east, London
In March they gave me some sort of promotion, presumably to sell me something afterwards, and for one week my profile was shown to everybody. Around two hundred likes, a hundred and some messages, and I sat there feeling briefly magnificent. Of that entire week, one person asked me a question about something I had written. One. The other conversations were interchangeable and most of them died within four exchanges.
Thirty eight, the south east, switch, six years in, two arrangements and one long friendship out of the first.
I had genuinely believed my problem was visibility. It turns out my problem was that a hundred people glancing at you is not the same as one person reading you, and that the app is built to sell the first while everybody on it is looking for the second.
So I am back to a small number of conversations and this post, which is longer than anything a profile allows.
What I want is either direction, ongoing, with structure and a weekly rhythm. Not looking for volume. Not looking for anybody who will describe their own popularity on here. And not looking for a conversation that consists of two people taking turns to be agreeable, which is what a hundred and some of them were.