Post, Like, Comment

Why do I post, like and comment? The economics make no sense. I'm not going to have millions of subscribers (I would love that though!)... So why post, like and comment at all...

Coming back to social media on Substack and LinkedIn has added to my life and also made me feel there is something sitting just out of view that I’ve not come to terms with. This post is my attempt to unpack that feeling.

I’d love to be successful on these platforms. To have hundreds, thousands, millions of followers hanging on my every word and debating and discussing my thoughts so much that I’m only able to observe and occasionally pick winners. It would be amazing to have that recognition and feeling that what I write “has meaning”. I’m not going to hide from this.

I’ve tried to convince myself that I write only for myself or I post, like and comment just because the mood hits me. Being honest, I do it in the hope that someone sees me. I’m saying ‘hi’, in the hope that someone says ‘hi’ back. Ideally, a lot of people.

We all see those posts on Substack about ‘how to build a following’ and ‘how long it took me to get to a zillion subscribers’ and ‘how to feel bad about your single digit subscriber count’. They make me strangely irritated. I’d love to have those followers and that certainty to my growth, but it somehow feels like the wrong way to do things. Too much focus on making a great first impression that we forget why we even came to the party.

I know what it would take to build such a following. I’d need to write to a vibe or niche that attracts that kind of attention. I would need to be regular in my posts. I should build networks with popular people and like/comment their posts to build mutual respect and attract their readers to me. And, I suspect, if I’m honest with myself - I also need to be someone else. Someone who is already recognized in other areas so people are eager to follow them or someone motivated to do whatever it takes to be recognized. I also suspect that I’d need to be a better writer, with a better voice. I sometimes wonder if I enjoy writing my own way too much. I don’t think enough about ‘what people want to read’ and too much ‘what I’d like to write’.

Which leaves me feeling a strange kind of stuck, but not stuck. Like I think I should feel stuck and frustrated by this but at the same time, I not stuck or unhappy with how things are. Yet I can’t shake this feeling that I should be feeling stuck… What’s wrong with me… I could be writing! Oh, yah.

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Tyler Cowen writes the blog Marginal Revolution and comments from time to time that due to network effects, if you want to build a following, post on the dominate platforms - twitter, Facebook, etc… This makes obvious sense. Yet when I consider setting up a twitter account (again!) and thinking about what to post there, posting it regularly and slowly building a following, and, and, and… It just sounds like a lot of work. I’m certain I could build a great network of people on that platform too. I would find content that I enjoyed and authors I could like, comment. I could write about… the same stuff I write about on Substack and LinkedIn but different.

Lately, I keep thinking about those people thousands of years ago who made cave paintings. They must have done it with some feeling of wanting to leave something behind. Maybe it was then or maybe it was before that in our basic human nature - this desire to leave a mark on a world and be recognized by others. It must be linked to our social nature and underpins who we are as a people. Everything around us is possible because people before us strongly desired to leave a mark; to make something meaningful. We not only stand on the shoulders of giants - we read their markings and like, comment, subscribe to what they have left behind.

The economics don’t make any rational sense. On LinkedIn ~1% of people like, comment, post. And a small fraction of those posts are liked or commented on by more than 5 people. Name a category or theme and there are already a few hundred people posting daily about that topic with flashy graphics, quotes, podcasts and endorsements. And a few thousand people trying to upgrade into that few hundred.

Anyone who enters this with an intention to write about anything will be immediately frustrated. The vast majority of everything that we will ever post is never read by anyone. We are utterly failing in our intention to leave something behind. And, I wonder if that is the point - it’s a feature of our intense desire to write. If our desire to leave something behind was linked strongly to a need for immediate recognition, we wouldn’t have left anything behind.

Most of the time, most things, most people produce won’t be useful at that point in time to someone who is immediately next to them. The other residents of the caves likely didn’t care about those paintings. Social media and corporate work show this a prevalent trait but isn’t universal. Even on the most prevalent Facebook has less than 30% of users posting, commenting and liking. In a typical company, a small fraction of people actually proactively document useful information for their colleagues. This is especially indicative given that a portion of their salary is explicitly given to ensure they document what they do. In many ways, many jobs are payment for data collection and documentation for a specific outcome.

I’m clearly one of those ~1% to 30% of people who has an intense need to leave things behind. I’d love to be recognized but I also won’t stop writing even if I’m not recognized. I want to write things that are meaningful if left behind, fun for me to write and fulfilling. I don’t write to spite or earn money. But I can admit that I’d love to earn money writing, if I could do so without writing with the intention to earn money, which somehow feels like it would ruin the experience of writing for me… Again, that weird feeling that I “should” care about such things, but I don’t.

Even asking GenAI Agents like ChatGPT to help me improve my writing is problematic for me. I use CoPilot religiously at work to improve my corporate reports, emails and presentations. But, in my personal writing I hate the suggestions and changes. There is something core to how I see myself in my writing. A selfish desire that people recognize me for what I really wrote not something churned-out by another. This is certainly negative. The agents often recommend reasonable improvements to my writing. All of which make me intensely angry. No. It’s much better to post terrible writing that no one reads than something poisoned by another and popular.

This is such a struggle. Even as I write these words, I catch myself thinking about how to twist the wording here or there to make it more appealing to a hypothetical reader; which is my imagination run wild. I could write like that. Questioning and tweaking. And in a way we always do. When we like, comment or post we naturally wonder - “how will this be seen?” But to optimize for that and to write for that… I just can’t be bothered.

Writing my way through this, I’m left with a few things:

1. I write, post, comment, like because I want to leave something meaningful behind and to recognize the work of others.

2. I would love to be recognized for what I write, but not being recognized doesn’t matter.

3. I’m not willing to write-to-be-recongized by selecting topics that increase my chance of recognition - even if that means I could end up not leaving something meaningful behind.

4. I enjoy the company of like-minded-people and my likes and comments are most impactful to those people.

I write because I must. I hope that I get recognized. And I have the intention to recognize others, build community and leave something behind. I’ll certainly fail. Yet, I still post, comment and like.

This post expands on “We Write Because We Must”: