Vanity metrics
I'm reflecting on vanity metrics in social media and my excitement (and missteps) promoting my upcoming album.
Everyone’s a little vain, really. If you’re on social media—and who isn’t—then you’re lying if you claim that you’ve never gleefully checked the Like count on a particularly good post you were proud of. We’ve all been trained, like the proverbial rat in a cage, to press the dopamine button and try to get the machine to love us.
A dozen years ago I was working at the Guardian and wrote a piece on the newly-launched Developer Blog about the first stage of a website redesign we’d been working on. I was a member of the team working on this, but certainly not the main contributor. I liked to write, though, so my teammates were fine with me being the “face” of the work, at least as far as the scope of the blogpost went.
Six months later I was on stage at my first tech conference as a speaker, doing a presentation version of the article to a paying audience. A year after the article, I was giving my second, similarly-themed talk. For a brief period, I was mildly on “the circuit” of tech conferences.
The effect on my Twitter following was significant: suddenly there were thousands of people following me, presumably hanging on my every word about mobile web design and “new media” (if that was still a thing). The mild taste of fame went to my head and I’ve written here before about now-embarrassing ego trips I took on social media where the number of followers I had somehow “earned” made me drunk on the imaginary authority I wielded.
It’s designed to be intoxicating, though. I’d been working on the web for long enough to know what made things go “viral”: numbers you could game, pictures of people’s faces next to things, and gimmicky headlines and curiosity gaps. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the same things were fooling me, too.
I said a–Tik,Tok…
I’m releasing an album of my music at the end of this month, and as an experiment, I joined TikTok this week to see how it works to promote music. It’s apparently where all the music discovery happens now, and I was curious about using it as a brand new account and seeing where—if anywhere—it took me.
I posted some absolutely innocuous stuff: the album artwork for the new record, a generic “bloke with guitar” photo. I went to bed and woke up to see that both “videos” (I think TikTok somehow magically made them into clips with automatic effects/music…?) had received almost 1000 views. I didn’t even have any followers!
Some googling revealed this this is common – I wasn’t a social media savant. “The algorithm” allegedly rewards new users by heavily promoting their new content, dropping it into the main feed of random users until the post accrues approximately 1000 views. Indeed, as the screenshot above demonstrates, all my posts have completely plateaued at this number (and/or at 100 likes).
Despite trying to watch this happen with the air of Louis Theroux, detached and cynical, I was secretly thrilled. Maybe I was going to reach a huge audience here and all my hard work and emotion poured into writing and recording these songs was going to pay off?
Nope: it’s vanity metrics again. My posts weren’t particularly novel or engaging: they were just being pumped at the frankly incredible userbase that TikTok controls until they reached the watermark, then down they sank without trace. The people engaging with my posts were strangers, and the detailed stats provided by TikTok showed that most of them disappeared within a couple of seconds of the video starting. A loyal fanbase, this wasn’t.
And despite having seen this happen on multiple social networks across multiple decades, I’d once again fallen for it. I was finding myself checking back every half an hour to see how many new Likes I’d had, and wandering what other videos I could create. This is how they get you…
Fool me once…
This very newsletter comes with some vanity metrics too. I know how many people are subscribed to it, how many people actually open it (thank you!), and how many people unsubscribe after each mailout. In the last two editions I lost a single subscriber each time – both of whom were people I know well. I re-read the emails and wondered what I’d said that made them think “I don’t want to receive these emails any more” – just like TikTok shows a chart of where people’s attention drifted during your video, I wondered which poorly-worded sentence made them decide to leave.
But I reminded myself once more that it’s all just vanity metrics. I love writing this thing every week for myself first and foremost – it’s stretching my creative muscles, it’s giving me a moment to pause and reflect, and it makes me think about things in more detail than I normally do. I love that people read it, I really do. But it doesn’t feel good to obsess over numbers that really only mean something to me – even when they shouldn’t.
So I’m turning them off. Anywhere I can. Don’t tell me the odds, don’t show me the likes, don’t pre-inform my opinion. There’s enough vanity in the world already, and I’ve had my fingers (and ego) burned enough times before to keep making the same mistake.
Mini-feels this week
If you pre-save this record, your life will be better
As mentioned above, I have an album coming out next week. Here’s a trailer for it!
If you like what you hear, you can “pre-save” it on Spotify so you’ll hear it when it’s out in 10 days’ time. Go here and click pre-save and you’ll help my vanity metric addiction to justify itself. Thanks!