你应该多发一些帖子 | aadil pickle --- You should probably post more | aadil pickle
> "Damn, my writing must suck. Oh well, pretty standard. I guess the audience doesn't like my content."
I posted it on Hacker News too because it takes an extra 30 seconds then totally forgot about it. Until a friend of a friend I met recently said he read my blog and really liked it.
I was surprised because he mentioned the blog that I thought no one saw. I liked that post too, so I was kind of sad it was lost to the abyss. But it was validating that this dude read it and liked it enough to mention it to me.
2 more friends messaged me saying they liked my post. I think it was on the front page for a bit. I decided to post about it again on Twitter. It's now sitting at 20K views wheras before I thought I'd gotten shadowbanned for posting a link.
The same people who grew up making Vines with their friends and posting on Tumblr about their favourite boy bands are now lurkers and doomscrollers. So much of the content we see online is perfectly manicured slop, fed to us by an algorithm that's built to maximize how much time we spend on the app rather than making us feel good. Gen Z is the most documented and observed generation of all time. Your life is a movie and someone's always watching.
If what your making doesn't have a hook, perfectly timed cuts, and some sort of ragebait for the comment section, nobody will watch it. You might as well not even try because why are you trying to be an influencer so bad? Get over yourself.
Yet, to make anything good, you have to cross the chasm of cringe. Most of the people with secret YouTube channels in high school stopped making stuff, but some of them now make movies. At a certain point, they got good enough that their output matched their taste, and instead of being considered cringe, their effort is celebrated. Thank you to Timothee Chalament for cementing that it's cool to care again.
The problem is if you create in a vacuum, you'll have no way to improve. In private, everything I make is a masterpiece. No one can tell me otherwise as long as I keep it to myself. The opposite is also true. I can think something I make is garbage because I'm so close to it that all the mistakes are visible to me, but someone else viewing it from some distance can maybe appreciate its value more than I can. No matter how harsh or light a critic you are, you are a bad judge of your own work.
The only criteria you should have for putting stuff out is if you think at least 1 person will like it. Ideally that person is you, but when I'm really in the mood to beat myself up, I imagine the ideal audience as a close friend or family member. And you have to be honest with yourself about that, because dropping slop over and over means you'll never improve, but so does never dropping anything. 1 person, that's it.
If you're worried that people will think you're cringe for posting too much, that's also fine. Most people won't see it, and even the people that see it probably won't remember because our memories are so rotted from scrolling. If someone remembers your work enough to criticize it or you, you've already won.
It takes about 3 exposures for something to be effective, so realistically if you want to be seen by anyone, try posting 3 times and changing it up a little. The algorithms won't punish you if you sufficiently add to your original work. It's easier to blame a shadowban than admitting your stuff isn't very good or you haven't been patient enough.
Also, we know that most content is brainrot, so if you think your stuff is good, why not give people more chances to see it?
If you're worried about not enough people seeing your stuff, that's fine. It's about who could see it rather than how many. I'd rather be known well then well known.
I have a friend who wrote a weekly update about his startup for 2 years. That entire time, he only ever had 100 subscribers. But one of them happened to be an investor who gave him his first check before he had a product, revenue or anything, so he could come to San Francisco and work on it full time.
Similar story: Another friend wrote a blog during college. Years later, an angel investor agreed to meet with and eventually fund him because he liked one of my friend's posts.
A meme viewed by a million people has a near net-zero impact on the world. Something you put your soul into could be seen by a hundred people yet really resonate with someone and might change their life. Or yours. Or both.