Good Morning, John
I have been on the internet for a long time now and I’ve also watched a lot of other people be
on the internet for a long time and it seems like,
though I appreciate constant calls to oh god, oh god, go touch some grass,
we are going to all continue being on the internet.
Despite the fact that we are not particularly good at it.
Since we cannot stop the only choice we have is to get better at it.
And this, I would like to give you my absolute number one tip
to putting your thoughts on the internet whether it’s a Tweet to your 200 followers
or a YouTube video to 2 million.
A piece of understanding that absolutely every early creator
including myself gets wrong, and that I have seen results
in the end of a bunch of careers before it was time for them to end.
Listen carefully, listen closely.
If you make something that reaches a very large number of people,
you will hear every single conceivable thought reaction and opinion
that a human person in our culture could have.
The axiom of virality. The larger the reach of your content,
the larger the pool of takes.
This is just a statistical fact. Any piece of content has the potential pool
of thousands of reactions that people could have to it,
but some of them are extremely uncommon.
Now the most common ones are probably the ones
that you will see first, though of course,
there’s always the chance that you’ll get an uncommon one first.
Which would be great, if they were Pokemon cards,
but they’re not.
The uncommon ones often have two very bizarre attributes.
First, they are more likely to be silly and wrong,
and thus they should be ignored.
And second, they are more likely to shock you and others,
and so they are harder to ignore.
And so, people reply to them, and they engage with them.
Which many modern algorithms see as increasing engagement,
increasing the time you’re spending on the platform,
and thus the the less common worse opinions are often intentionally promoted.
But the uncommon opinion does not deserve to be the center
of attention because it is far outside the center of opinion.
If it weren’t, it would not have been so shocking.
The only reason it even exists is because the piece of content
in question reached so many people that it is not only likely,
but guaranteed to receive extremely weird takes.
In my opinion,
and there are other opinions here, but in my opinion
as a person who's been doing this for a long time,
the only thing to do with those bizarre takes is to see them as fringe weirdness.
And when you see them, think oh, that one’s weird.
Like it was a particularly ugly frog. Some reactions are impossible not to harp on.
Not to be disturbed by even. And the pool of potential takes
is different for different creators.
Which makes this job harder for certain kinds of people.
If I had to deal with half of what I’ve seen some of my friends
who are women or Black people deal with, I would just have quit.
I would not do this anymore. But I don’t know how to stop
the takes from coming, I only know that the takes will come.
So if you can find a way to have them matter less or not at all,
you should.
Because if you have a piece of content that goes very viral,
and you find yourself astounded
by some of the takes it receive. Remember, people are very weird.
You know this. You’ve met them. If your Tweet reached ten million people,
you will see every possible confusion, every possible bad faith interpretation,
every single possible reaction.
And the fact that the reaction exists doesn’t mean it should matter to you.
We’re not designed to be good at receiving reaction
of a crowd of tens of millions of people.
And figuring out how to classify some things as like oh, god,
just go touch some grass. I’m not gonna pay attention
to your takes.
And the ones that are a legitimate criticism that I should be paying attention to,
are honestly possibly the hardest part of this job.
I’ve been doing it for a very long time, and I’m still working at getting better at it.
But one thing I can say to every creator out there,
the mere fact that a take exists does not mean that it is worthy of
even one neuron of your brain focusing on it.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.