Do Algorithms Have Feelings?

’Cause I must have hurt them…

For the past couple of stories, I have remarked on the fact that quite possibly the number of people who are exposed to any given writer's stuff is but a fraction of the total number of people who followed that writer.

The math of it

i.e. If a writer is followed by x number of readers, then when he publishes a story, it is not fed to at least those X number of people, but only a fraction of his followers. Some compute to 1% or even half that.

This leaves 99% of the readers who think they follow a writer uninformed of a writer's work when they had expectations of following it.

This situation, of course, if that is the case, does the reader/fan no good and certainly does the writer no good. Actually, it borders on self-deception. It's a checking account that hasn't been balanced.

I have pointed this out, not in the spirit of being a sore loser, but rather in the spirit of “here's the problem, be aware and do something to compensate when you can.”

The first thing I intend to do is to experiment to see if this is the case.

The experiment

As everyone who reads my stories knows, I am a bit of a bean counter, so as sad as that may be, I do know my read counts I expect for a given story. I also know my number of followers and my number of subscribed followers.

Now, I must say that this is not a subscription to a newsletter, but a subscription to the service that takes each of my stories upon publication and forwards a copy to the inbox of the subscriber.

So the experiment is this. I would ask all of you reading this, especially those of you who are followers, to please hit the little envelope icon and have the stories delivered to you. If you don't like it you can unsubscribe later, but for now, I would appreciate your help in this.

Then I can simply compare my view and read numbers before and after an increase in subscriptions, and report on that to you.

I can and will continue to refine this process and keep you apprised.

Cheap Trick

Some of you may ask yourself “is this one of Martin’s cheap tricks to get his subscription rate up?”

Well, yes and no. Many of you know by now that is certainly not beneath me, but the fact is after I mouthed off about this algorithm thing last week, my views dropped significantly. Tremendously. Without any causal drop in followers.

I must have hurt its artificial feelings, so I just want to check my gut instinct.

Then if I have to, I will issue an artificial apology and concentrate more on subscriptions.

For now, thank you for your time. (my profile — Twitter)

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