The author clearly doesn't understand the concept of audience. I have thousands of followers on Twitter, just hundreds on Mastodon.
We can't move, we can only transition and hope others follow.
Also, don't expect a lot of people to read your blog, unless you have a very hot take, like this post lol
Maybe instead of views, consider the effect of your words on the outside world. How often does a tweet change your thinking or deeply enlighten you? The rare times something like this sorta happens is in the awkward form of a tweet thread, where it would've been much better as a proper article. Speaking personally, there's blog articles that have vastly changed my view of some part of reality and improved my life.
Let's pretend you have a blog, you're writing on it for years. It's affecting people positively. But nobody ever says a thing about it directly to you, you have no analytics running in the background, no like button. Eventually, you're probably going to stop writing on the blog, feeling it's a waste of time.
We can point to popular bloggers all we want, but the fact remains most of them either have some form of view count operating (or likes/claps/whatever gimmick to replicate that "I see you" validation), had rare real life validation based on their blogs (being hired at xyz place because someone said they were a fan... but usually these blogs tend to go abandoned after they get hired), or relied on social networks to encourage them to continue writing their blogs.
Until this is solved in a healthier way, we're not really going to be free of view counts.
The way you get free of view counts is by not worrying about them.
In case you use them interchangeably, what do you write about?
A log is a journal.
Ergo, to write a blog is to journal something.
[1]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/academic-development/ass...
(user account exists to promote Hitler worship, I checked)
This is why I have a hard time with how many people push against view counts as the ultimate bad. They are just another metric, one we use for validation, but still just a metric. Sure, you might think it's healthier to care about more WebMentions, but what are those when you peel away the layers of branding?
I suppose we can't really escape our desperate need to be seen, even in digital space.
In the early days of websites people often just had articles organized by topic on their website that interested readers could peruse. There might be a "What's New" section to let people know what was updated, but other than that old content was treated as being just as relevant as new content.
The blog space flipped that. Instead of most of the information being presented non-chronologically with a possible area to let people know what's new, now information was prioritized by how new it was, with a possible area to list older posts. Old blog posts that don't make it to the list end up being well hidden and almost never read.
For most people, the appeal of a blog over the older long-form articles was that blogs provided a somewhat constant stream of new content. You hear this when people tell others how to blog - "right a blog post everyday/everyweek." With a personal website, you don't want your high quality articles drowned out in a sea of low level off the cuff writing. But most blogs thrive on that, because a stream of new articles is needed to keep people coming back. Almost no one would want to put a low effort website up that only says, "Man, watching the news this week. What is the world coming to?", but those kinds of hot takes are all over the blog world.
Additionally, on older sites comments often consisted of an individual e-mailing the author of a site, who might that have a page for useful reader comments. The blog comment space was about firing off quick reactions, getting a quick response, and then having the whole discussion buried a day (or sometimes mere hours) later as other blog posts supplanted the top one.
I remember it differently. Personal websites of the day were structured much like blogs would be, with a single index page listing all the articles in reverse-chronological order (or for the lazy/unconcerned with bandwidth, a big honking text file with new entries appended to the top). What you're describing wasn't the blog precursors, but the wiki precursors, with pages nicely organized according to topic (with copious links to the related sites in your webring).
I agree that one of the biggest original draws of the "blog" concept was the convenient comments section, but in retrospect comments aren't at all necessary to the concept of "blogging", especially since the term now encompasses the pre-blog activity that was previously just "throwing up random articles on your own personal domain".
As for the view count trap, we all prominently displayed our "N people have viewed this page" widgets on Geocities. :P
I don't think that was the norm at all outside of news sites. Like I said, there might be a what's new page, but I remember sites mostly organizing articles by topic, and updating them inside the article. See, for instance, the Marathon Story Page[1]. All of the articles are there on the side bar, organized by topic. There is a "What's New" section, but it's not useful for reaching the bulk of the site. It contains updates, not the content. The blog movement flipped this.
You can see this shift in action by looking at the site superdickery.com. If you look at early versions of the site[2], it's nicely organized based on topic. Then at some point the join the ongoing trend and turn it into a blog[3], and almost all the content becomes obscure and difficult to find.
[1] https://marathon.bungie.org/story/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070829035629/http://www.superd... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20150831061840/http://www.superd...
I critique your comment: the use of the word trap implies an inherent negativity to view count. As dang has written, often some of these raw numbers (similar to the length of a comment on HN) have a strong correlation with the quality of the content.
But now you're in the trap, because you've accepted these numbers as the true proxy for influencing the world, and doing anything orthogonal to the algorithm will make number go down. In reality, you're doing what Twitter wants, not necessarily what you originally wanted.
Traps are for catching animals to eat. There’s nothing good about that for the animal. Even if you extend the analogy to the bait that got the animal in the trap, I still think it’s fundamentally different in that the outcome of these recommendation algorithms hits the spot after the fact. My Instagram Reels feeds me standup comic bits that are tailored to my taste! It’s a marvel of the modern world.
I highlight your use of true proxy as showing I failed to communicated my point. As long as you/we keep in mind that updoots and retweets are just the best we currently have and not a natural truth, we can continue to work towards a healthier alternative.
audience size directly correlates with revenue, so if you want to make any money on the internet you have to find some kind of strategy to cultivate said audience. It's not the only thing that correlates with revenue, but it's foolish to ignore its significance.
My speculation: Most of the people that are using Twitter aren't post a lot, nor are they posting anything a lot of "quality". Most is low signal, such as agreement. That does not make for an interesting blog. They are posting on Twitter because they have people saying things they like and in turn liking their support. Part of the reason people are having trouble with Mastodon is they do not have as wide a reach, so less fulfillment.
Take this blog for example, this one post is about 1/4 interesting information and 3/4 anti Twitter/Musk. I am glad that he made it, always great to share how to build and use tools!
I doubt that they will continue the blog though, their second post is them saying they are too lazy to write something quality and Lorem ipsum.
Most people want low effort engagement and most people do not consistently generate quality content. That is why Twitter gained and blogs lost.
Sure you have thousands of followers, but nobody will see your tweet 5 days from now.
With blog posts, you might not have thousands of followers, but if you pick your topic well, google no doubt sends you thousands of readers every month, for years to come.
Don't underestimate the power of SEO.
I don't know of any mastodon servers that report view counts, but interaction on mastodon (replies, likes, boosts) is reported to be dramatically higher per follower than interaction on twitter (replies, likes, retweets).
Your mileage may vary, but it seems to be pretty consistent.
Although their goal, given their post history, is not to get lots of people to read their blog - but to start writing, and to potentially have the right people read your blog. (And vice versa, to get the right blogs for them to actuallt get written.)
numbers vs community.
I was on twitter for 7 years. Hundreds of followers, thousands of tweets. Maybe 6 actual replies in that time.
I've been on mastodon for 5 years now. I have people I'd genuinely call friends. A community. Regular meaningful engagement with actual humans about the stuff we make and share with each other.
Twitter isn't designed for engagement between people. its designed to make money by getting you to engage with twitter as a platform.
Masto is chronological, so there’s WAY more chance of natural discovery of content. It’s not buried by the algorithm because it doesn’t align with the hot take of the day, or isn't “trending”.
I’ve personally found Mastodon to be far more engaging than Twitter, but that’s probably not going to be the se for everyone.
Many people with very large followings on twitter have reported that with even 10% or less as many followers on mastodon, they're seeing more engagement in terms of replies and like and boosts than they see on twitter for the same content.
My own take on this calculus is that those thousands of followers on Twitter are by definition comprised of the kind of people who voluntarily use Twitter, which is not the audience that I care to select for. I'd rather have ten high-quality followers than ten thousand low-quality ones.
There is a bit more bias towards audience size as the reason this is hard than I'm comfortable with though. Twitter as a medium is, in my controversial opinion, almost always a better medium than a blog.
There's a ton of counter-opinions, but I quite enjoy seeing a thread of toots, that decompose an idea into different segments. Having the tree of comments shooting off the thread adds context & shows which areas are high engagement, contested or loved, and which don't excite as much. Being able to cite specific pieces is better than most blogs permits. The granularity of threads is better than wall of texts, for me, and enables more interesting interactions. It's a richer online medium, and in my view, that's cool.
I hope over time we can start to see ActivityPub/Mastadon start to allow blogging like things that also boast more interactive capabilities than traditional blogs. Blog posts that are shareable on standards-based social media protocols, where commenting is also standards-based social media protocols, would be a huge lift, would allow for some of the memetic virality that has allowed the social media Walled Gardens to team with activity.
Making things based on standard protocols also allows for a choice of clients. Such that we can tackle the "blogs aren't realtime" challenge (which also talks about for example comments, another handled via our existing protocols!), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34231569
Understanding some of the genetic makeup of Twitter & social media & trying to recapture some of the capabilities we had is important in transitioning away. I worry that "start a fucking blog", while spirited & heart-in-the-right-place, suggests a lesser path, a path that isn't as ambitious as is mandatory for survival & thriving.
As if LinkedIn deprioritizes content that links out to…your blog.
I shut Twitter notifications off on my phone because all I still get at group chat spam about fake crypto giveaways and ads for Twitter Blue which I'm pretty sure violates Apple's app store terms.
Even the influencer types I follow see higher engagement on Mastodon even if the numbers look smaller, and have thrown in the towel.
Twitter's dead and buried.
I think it's actually that your side of the internet and the people you follow are in the tech niche, i.e. people who are conscious about this stuff are the ones who are leaving.
But the bulk of users, the people who don't care about technology, the millions of teenagers and memers are all going to stay on twitter.
I did notice that Twitter began banning people who the now CEO dislikes, and then letting some previously banned people back on such as the newly under arrest Andrew Tate who is almost certainly a participant in human trafficking.
In the real world, Musk is making twitter a toxic brand and his own image with it. He's not taking on establishment media so much as shitposting nonsense memes and tanking the value of his companies.
How many of those are human?
> just hundreds on Mastodon
Whereas those are most probably actual people.
> How many of those are human?
Many more than the ones that are on Mastodon.