Don’t Get Boosted, Go Viral
Or better still, ignore it and write what you want
Depressingly, anyone who writes or puts media on the internet eventually discovers that you are playing a kind of game. You post something, get wildly different results and after a while, you work out what will work and what won’t.
The reason that this is depressing is that in the pure attention economy of most of the online world, what you care about or put the most meaning into probably won’t work. What works is generally the stuff you write in ten minutes, the sensational, the negative, blah blah.
Then you have a choice. Either you engage in “audience capture”, which is to say you follow your stats, keep doing more of whatever is popular and less of what isn’t until you rise to the top of the algorithm, or else you write for writing's sake and be content to plow on in moderate obscurity.
For most of us, there is some middle way. That means “playing the game” enough to get some attention from the algorithm and ignoring it enough that you are not being dictated by it. The question is, what are some of the ways to do this without losing yourself or your purpose?
Does Boosting Help?
If you want to make money, the answer is… meh. More than a non-boosted unpopular article, but less than an article that gets audience popularity, or better still “goes viral”. When I first got some articles boosted I thought maybe it might provide a gap between the articles that fall shy of the algorithm and the ones that go way over the top, but as I said, meh:
Boosted:
Not Boosted:
Boosted:
Not Boosted:
As you can see, while it helps, boosting can’t actually do anything to change the attention dynamics of the platform. It is just like getting a little push, if you are going uphill it will give you a few steps then you’ll slow down, if you’re going downhill it won’t matter because you’re on your way anyway.
I also have no idea who is boosting my articles or why, the selection always seems odd and you as a writer have no way of nominating which articles you might want to get boosted, so it is kind of doing nothing to mediate between attention metrics and writing merit.
Conclusion
Basically, ignore boosting. If you want to “play the game” then follow stats and write things that will make people click: trending topics, well-known names, sensationalism, and being controversial generally work. You might observe this from the myriad of articles saying controversial things about the Middle East right now with thousands of claps. Sadly, it works.
The most popular article I have written, by a college mile, is called “Why Taylor Swift is Everything Wrong with Modern Culture”, I unlisted it after a month because the stream of comments from Taylor Swift fans calling me a misogynist or worse was annoying me, and by then it was still going up exponentially, it had made 500 dollars in that month alone, so you can see my point. Trending, controversial, sensationalism.
Not that I don’t stand by what I wrote, but if I had called it “a cultural critical analysis the Taylor Swift phenomenon” I don’t think it would have had thousands of views.
It’s hard to walk this line. Platforms such as Substack are better because they enable you to build an audience that is reading you more specifically and so slightly divorced from the wheel of clickbait, but it is a much slower grind.
Basically, it’s always worth remembering how shallow our world has become. Those at the top are, with a few exceptions, those who just play the game, and the best writing to be found has to be dug out of obscurity. If you’re writing your heart out and getting nothing back, you’re probably doing alright. Playing the game once in a while might help, but don’t give up on writing your heart out.