Earn Your Damn Audience First Before You Start Complaining about Engagement

And then when you actually do earned them, you won’t be concerned with engagement at all. Once in a while I just happen to come by some post or comments expressing the lack of engagement in the platform and to some degree I can empathize. But after sometime studying how other social media platforms work and people’s interactions with content, some realizations just can’t be helped.

Rather than whine about low levels of engagement between users, one just needs to ask the question on whether the content or the user does something that makes them worth engaging in the first place? It’s easy to say we got a trend of users that don’t really care about engaging with other users but do we have a trend of consistent quality content pumped out that merits a lot of attention?

If 20 people came by your post, clicked it, spent less than half a minute scanning and left without any further action, who’s fault is it when your content didn’t get any engagement beyond a view of less than a minute? I’m sure those 20 people had bad taste in content. That’s much more pleasing to entertain for the ego. They should adjust to your entitled liking and how dare they not appreciate your post the way you want. To ignore your calls for discussion about your great ideas and what not.

Listen, if 20 people came by your post organically and didn’t gave a flying fuck about it, it just means your content wasn’t worth their time to be bothered with. Maybe some would leave an upvote as a tip for your effort saying at least you tried but that’s the usual fucks people can really do online when they are presented with content that doesn’t compel them to go past the upvote barrier at least. Be thankful they bothered to view it anyway and do better next time like using a clickbait title.

In my last post, I talked about how much you can gauge your content's value and it got around 22 unique views (not counting those that use Brave browser) and an average of 200 seconds of reading time. I hit my quota of 10 unique views per post and I’m happy with that even without the votes or comments. The comments, votes and follows are nice but my objective was to have people read it long enough towards the end because it takes a lot of skill to make people read through a thousand word shitpost. Retention > Click and Run.

So for most people that think votes and comments are the only hints that their posts are being engaged with, you might need to broaden your metrics as there are other subtle digits that tell your content matters more than you think. People online have a SHORT attention span and leaving meaningful comments is taxing. It takes so much energy to read a long post and comment thoughtfully but if you manage to get a lot of people to do that on your posts, that’s great, you’re doing something right.

Now I don’t really care if I get comments on this shitposting account. I’ve already marked my own success metrics from what the views can generate and the retention time people can stay on the post.

Any content creator playing the 4D game of content creation would be aware that there are barriers to engagement they need their audience to overcome. Here’s the difficulty level: Upvote/Downvote < Comment < Follow < Repeating the first three as a long term relationship.

Going back to the first call that got you here: Earn your damn audience first before your start whining you got none. Even the tiniest of details matter such as having concerns for the readability of content. Use 3-4 sentences when making a paragraph than do a wall of text that ain’t mobile friendly to read.

Have you seen videos on Youtube and Facebook having hundreds and thousands of views, but there’s a disproportionate amount of emojis and comments on the content? When you’re passively viewing content, it takes less effort and your view count is considered engagement by the invisible algorithm, taking some extra seconds to put a heart emoji on the content also counts as another level of engagement reached, then the comment and subscribe buttons involves the higher tiers of effort.

It's natural to get a lot of views/votes but only a small fraction of those participants can take it up to the next step when it comes to engagement with commenting back and forth as an upper tier. When you engage with the comment and reply process, you're already doing what most can't be bothered with and that's a subtle way of doing public relations.

Looking back at the people I follow, almost half of the names I subscribe came from me spotting their comments and not their posts. People underestimate the impact of visibility just by leaving a trail of comments.

Engagement takes effort and people online have short attention spans, lazy and want instant gratification with as little effort as possible to be invested. When people follow/subscribe, they aren’t in it for the content, they also subscribe to the personality behind the content so if you behave like a generic person posting content people can find anywhere else online, then you’re going to be treated like a generic stranger.

You really need a lot of gimmick to make people rise up to those levels of effort for that comment you are so depraved to have on your posts and that takes skill.

Wanting the benefits of fame without having the skills to earn them is entitlement. Whining about engagement on your posts without having any content that skillfully compels an audience to engage is entitlement. Welcome to the real world where those who don’t have the skills to attract attention gets the cold shoulder.

And it’s not all the time it’s your fault, let’s say you are about anti-censorship, well tough luck for you if you’re posting in a place where most don’t give a fuck about censorship until they are directly affected by it. I’m saying right content wrong place to promote. Ever consider that maybe you are doing everything right in terms of content creation except posting on the right platform? This place has a small crowd with diverse interests and those interests are mostly aligned with what the average folks are into.

So if you happen to be into STEM, philosophy, conspiracy, and anti-censorship, expect that you’re going to have less eyes on those types of content because the platform just has too few content consumers that can stroke your ego on those topics. So is it the platform’s fault that you’re unskilled at advertising your junk in a low traffic area?

Here’s a life hack that’s going to help you thrive on Hive, avoid getting self absorbed and go out your way and start getting interested in people. I’m not saying comment on their post nice and thanks for sharing, I’m saying get interested with people that share common interests with you. Most losers spend less time doing public relations and cry why curators aren’t picking up their shit posted once they churned it out to the abyss of the network.

Trust me, most of the votes I cast out aren’t because I like the content, these are a combination of automated trail voting, manual curation on content I like, and manual curation to the person I like. Sometimes the votes just come not because you made a fucking good job on the post, they come because people like you and your stuff just comes in second. People subscribe to a personality and it’s less about the content.

I’m not interested in everything that shows up on my follow feed and I’m sure the people that follow me aren’t interested in the stuff I post sometimes. And that’s natural.

You don’t necessarily watch every content that’s trending on Youtube or other social media sites to engage with it. And when you do like something, how often do you cast a vote, follow or comment on content you like? Yeah, nobody has all that time in the world to do those every time. Then how much more can you be compelled to engage with a stranger’s content that you hardly care for?

Anyone can make the best post about apples on Hive, and I may click upvote on it but that’s the most engagement it can get from me cause I just don’t like apples but appreciate how well written the post can be. So does that mean the content creator did something wrong if several other people shared the same sentiment as me?

Don’t take it personal if your content made got no attention beyond an organic upvote. People are entitled to their own preference on what posts they want to engage and this isn’t within your control. It’s wasteful thinking to be concerned about low levels of engagement. The problem isn’t on the audience side but the burden is on the creator’s side to make content compelling enough to make their audience care about.

Attention is the social currency of the platform dear, you give the value to others and it’s a gamble on whether they’d reciprocate it or not which most of the time they would as people have a strong sense of reciprocity. But it also depends on the quality of attention you put into the relationship that makes your long term connection with your audience work. People would know if you’re just doing shit for the votes.

And because attention is a currency, spending it on others means you spend less attention to yourself and people don’t want to see the self absorbed jerking their own posts. The first 10 people you can get to give a fuck about you is the hardest and the numbers after that will eventually snowball to bigger things. That’s how all content creators start on any platform. It’s always the first 100 or 1000 quality followers they need to earn before they snowball into fame.

But people don’t get that logic because they expect that each post they would churn out will already merit them the attention they think they are entitled to. Because if doing quality public relations were easy everyone would be doing it. And it ain’t easy that’s why everyone else sucks at it and only few can actually thrive on the platform because they know how to do it. This is a social network and you just read a post form a refined shitposter.