What Kind of Future for This Place?

If modest had a little brother, this site would be his teddy bear

Photo by Barrett Ward on Unsplash

Some make it big! On Notes, you’ll often find posts from people who began writing, for the first time ever, 20 minutes ago, and now they have 20,000 subscribers and are number 1 or 2 in all categories.

It is hard to decode what makes them that big, as they are mostly writing about all and nothing, in one mix, but they all claim that consistency is what matters. And they all want to tell you how to do like them (only for paid subscribers, of course).

Well, there are also the real successes, and there are many of them. They keep collecting more subscribers, and they get many reactions on anything they publish, be it articles or notes.

But we who live on the other side, the modest ones, are not really taking off.

We get a new subscriber now and then, but others leave, so the total is a very slow progression in that number. As for the articles, it can look even worse, as most of these will have 3 likes and one comment, if they are doing well. Some will have more, but the occasional one will have less.

Notes is a complete disaster for most of us modest ones: many posts there will get no reactions at all, and the occasional one will have 5 as a high number of likes, but questions asked are not answered, requests to share links neither, so it doesn’t feel like anybody really want us there.

We do get a response in many cases when commenting on the popular guys’ and girls’ posts, but just the one response from the posters themselves, not from anyone else.

We are the almost invisible and completely unneeded people there.

While being happy for the connection to a few great people who often or perhaps just now and then take a look at something I wrote in an article, I also feel a lot of the time that I wouldn’t be missed by many if I would stop writing here.

This place certainly doesn’t have an echo at the size of the Internet, where millions of servers all the time take in likes and comments from eager participants in the many discussions initiated by the many popular people.

This whole thing reminds me of several other situations in life where I feel the same, such as in my current job search – even though the companies aren’t inviting me for interviews, I can almost feel they dismay at the distance, when they see my application and quickly conclude that they really don’t care what I can do or which experience I have: I’m not 25, newly graduated and good-looking, so they don’t want me there.

The job market speaks about equal opportunities and how much they want applications from all kinds of people, to reflect the surrounding society. But it is all crap, because they never hire any of these “diverse” people, except for a single one now and then, so that they can show a smiling, diverse face in their annual report, to tell the story about how much they do for the local society.

And the Internet is similar. There should be room for all of us, and the main driver in this should be a wish and some skills to write and to keep entertaining others with the writing. And having done that for the majority of the life of the Internet (for 30 years or so), I can now tell that it is also crap. Here, on the Internet, all the same sorting mechanisms are in place as in the job market.

I keep thinking about Liza from The Simpsons, who in one episode studied why some people always became the victims of bullies, and her conclusion, that nobody wanted to hear, was that “It’s their scent! - The victims smell in a special way that the bullies can’t resist, so the latter just have to bully them!”

I believe that this scent is in my emails with job applications, and it travels with the articles and posts I write and publish on Substack as well.

For the same reason, what I actually had in mind with this article, to provide a questionnaire for you all to get a chance to tell what kinds of contents you would like to see and something about the frequency, the size, and the decorations (own photos vs. stock photos, for instance – or would you like to see my home-knitted socks?) – will not happen. My scent would ensure that the replies would be biased, and I want to avoid that.

Instead, I would ask anyone who has the wish to help me get to the bottom of the problem, to tell a few words in the comments about what they enjoy reading, and what they don’t. If you can add links to other articles that are particularly good or bad – those written by others, in particular, to get inspired from – it will be extra great.

With this, I will see how I may be able to improve things. I would probably need to carry a fully covering protection suit, like they use in laboratories, when writing, going forward. Not to protect me, but to protect the articles from being infected with my scent that makes them unsuccessful. To protect the articles from me.

Looking forward to hearing from you – and growing this place into the teddy bear that all the children would like to have, and which would no longer be in the hands of the most modest success on the Internet. A scent-less joy of reading, full of not me.