Social media, where a teaser post about your article gets a better response than your actual article
I’ve seen this recurring theme on Twitter, LinkedIn, and virtually every microblogging social platform I’ve used. Teasing something exciting you’re working on gets better visibility than when you share that work itself.
Here’s an example from the Twitter of yore—which people forget wasn’t all that great either:
And here’s LinkedIn recently:
Then there’s peak reddit. Here’s an example of a commenter who, without reading the original article—natch—dismisses the post’s title with a response that links to my own blog..
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Social network algorithms are designed to bury posts with links because they want to limit engagement to their own websites. And, people are lazy to click on links even when they do see them because it’s easier to doom scroll an infinite feed instead. Both of these things encourage and reward short performative posts rather than longer, more thoughtful work. Social media platforms as they’re designed today don’t reward depth.
Furthermore, X’ed Twitter suppresses visibility of your posts if you don’t pay for blue checkmarks of vanity while LinkedIn’s Newsletter product for creators is a spam and a scam. Oh, and recently LinkedIn rejected my application to their program for journalists.
On the other hand, people reading articles via email or their RSS readers tend to better absorb longform writing. If they can’t read something interesting in their inbox right away, they tend to get back to it when they have better bandwidth. I’m glad that with my space blog in particular, I’ve invested in readers who use one of these two methods to keep up with my writing rather than me hopelessly hoping that my social media followers will randomly see and click on my links in their feeds in the order of hundreds to thousands for each new piece.