A seven-minute post on:
- Audiences, and where I (might) find them;
- Twiddling – and the dilemma up-and-coming artists didn’t ask to be put in;
- TTLY…: Old posts.
Ughhhh…
I don’t feel like my writing has been quite so sharp as late. My last two posts have tried to be analyses and ended up as plot summaries – more or less:
https://brologue.net/2025/01/04/sickbags-on-standby/
https://brologue.net/2025/01/01/can-you-imagine-a-world-without-economists/
At least in the former post, one could argue that YouTube has pretty much superseded all mediums of public video game discussion, save for professional journalism. If you came to my blog to understand how TR. ???, worked, you’re looking in the wrong place – this video by SlayXc2 does the trick:
But what’s really eating me – as you may or may not have seen me vent – is figuring out where I stand on this whole ‘audience’ thing:
https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/113736921846613255
I have no idea who reads this blog. That is by design. So far, the only way I know that someone has read these posts is if they’ve reacted to their syndicated forms on BlueSky and Mastodon.
I write for the love of the game, but I can’t lie, I yearn for the qualitative feedback that Cory Doctorow writes about here:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/
These are my values, too. Even when social media platforms promise you an audience, I try to write under the assumption of the old, good internet. I can market myself all I want, anywhere, everywhere, all at once – never did the World Wide Web promise anyone an audience:
https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful
The only thing the web ever guaranteed is that willing senders – that is, me – can leave things on the network “long enough for others to find it, after the fact.”
When social media platforms make you a promise of an audience, what’s really being said is that they’re offering you to play a game that, if you win, will give you a following almost overnight; from that point, people will say your work just… ‘happened.’
This audience generator, this lottery/gacha/”market logic,” is called twiddling. It’s not a fair game. I urge you, with every fibre of my being, to listen to this excerpt from a talk Doctorow gave at DEF CON 32 last year:
The effect of twiddling puts us up-and-coming writers in a dilemma that we didn’t ask to be put in. We would like that qualitative feedback that Doctorow talks about, but our audience is a zygote that only divides based on a chain of arbitrary whims. We’d like to post without care of likes, reposts, statistics, but to get there, we kinda have to care about them, for a time.
I used to balk at YouTubers who remind you to like, subscribe, and hit the bell, as if they assume their audience is thick. Then the penny dropped. On social media, these are the atomic units of interaction. The only way you can express yourself less is to do nothing.
Since there’s a running theme of carnie games, one could draw a comparison to claw machines: the only way one can express oneself at a claw machine is to pay up and play. But no matter how much you plug away, a claw machine will never cough up until it meets the payout set by its owner:
So, as we’re led to believe, the more videos one makes with that insipid reminder, the more chances, in theory, that the Algorithm™ will reward one with an audience. (Of all the things I do when videosmithing, doing the voiceover for that reminder is perhaps the thing I hate the most.)
We know that little shit didn’t really win the teddy bear they’ve been dragging up and down the midway all day. Yet we are obliged to pretend otherwise.
Asking my friends to notice my art feels shameful. But this is the attention economy. If ‘attention’ is the only metric that’s worth measuring (whatever qualitative value one divines from the numbers), and an ‘economy’ is just the algorithms by which netizens are allocated the things we want to see, then the only thing artists unknown can do is ask for attention.
That is, unless we aren’t obliged to pretend. It’s hard to kvetch at the Algorithm™ for kvetching’s sake if you know exactly how a platform sorts your posts. For instance, we know how Mastodon’s algorithm works – in brief, “not like the others:”
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/28/On-Algorithms#p-1
With the advent of the Fediverse generally and Mastodon specifically, for the first time we have a large-scale opportunity to experiment with algorithms that are written for people by people just because they’re cool, or because they produce feeds that the programmer likes for herself…
After all, as I quoted David Gerard not so long ago, all Fediverse platforms, not just Mastodon, are “run by the sort of people who have opinions on Linux distributions:”
“This is just another post waxing lyrical about Mastodon, isn’t it?”
Well, yes, but technically, no. I’m unsure to what extent ‘custom’ means in Bluesky’s ‘Custom Feeds,’ but you are at least told what sort of posts you are likely to see:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds
Here’s what I can say about the Mastodon Engagement Metagame (the MEM, if you wanna make that a thing): hashtags are EVERYTHING:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/14/wash-that-x-site-outta-our-hair/
What once was used by the individual author to organise their posts was adapted as a signal to other users – “I’m posting about this, and if you find it interesting, you should post about it too.”
I’d forgotten I wrote this, but it’s become a very salient point as of late. It’s not a new year’s resolution or anything, but I recently decided to contribute to the many writers’ hashtags that serve as Mastodon’s daily seminar: #writerscoffeeclub, #wordweavers, #pennedpossibilities.
There, I am seen. There, I find eyeballs and people who may very well turn out to be my future readers. As Charlie Stross recently wrote, these things are here for you to market yourself (and, I know, I shouldn’t feel any shame doing so):
https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113771365037468497
To some, these tags are more than just a water cooler surrogate. They can be a means by which writers of all stripes, who are looking to be published can pool their knowledge about their craft. To return to Doctorow for a moment, I think back on his meta-advice for ‘breaking in:’
https://locusmag.com/2021/09/cory-doctorow-breaking-in/
Just as a writers’ critiquing circle should consist of writers of similar ability, so too should a writers’ professional support circle consist of writers at similar places in their careers.
Do we have hashtags on Mastodon to share what we know about the publishing market, or rejection letters? Well, we should.
Hashtags on Mastodon reflect an action that has always been crucial to the thriving of creative works, an action that is only going to become more essential as AI slop floods our search results with garbage: if you play/watch/read something you really liked, and want your friends to share in your enjoyment, tell them about it. Tell them – and tell the creator, too. We’ll be delighted you did.
TTLY…
- [Jan 6] Wait Just a Pomodoro – Something’s Wrong About Time https://brologue.net/2024/01/06/thought-i-d-something-more-to-say/
Chasing the Audience is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.