The Dark Side of Trying to Go Viral
Why quality beats quantity on the internet
Our incessant desire for fame and influence blinds us to its accompanying costs. The modern day expression of this is the unrelenting desire to go viral online.
Virality is the mascot of internet fame and influence.
It is representative of having ‘made it’ — having created something popular enough to catch the attention of millions, no matter how fleeting and temporary their attention might be.
But with virality comes the sacrifice of intimacy with one’s audience, a loss of personal privacy, and confusion as to how to deal with the many eyeballs that come with this internet spotlight.
To intentionally target virality, one must shift their focus towards catching the attention of the collective.
By speaking to the collective, you automatically forego speaking to the individual — to a specific person that needs to hear what you have to say.
Meaningful content is content that is designed thoughtfully, specifically, and personally. It resonates deeply with the reader, because it feels like it was meant to be read by them, not by just anyone who stumbled upon it.
On the contrary, content designed to go viral feels general, click-baity, high level, transactional. It feels beige.
It feels like what it is: one of many posts trying to climb to the top of the internet for no particular reason except to see what it’s like up there. To reach scale, achieve fame, and to do it all very quickly.
But like any short cut in life, there are costs.
There’s a dark side to growing infatuated with the idea of going viral, a cost to trying to capture its tempting benefits with each new piece of content.
While some of virality’s dangers are more obvious than others, we will dive into each of them, and explore a better way to find what we’re looking for online.
What We Think We Want vs. What We Actually Want
Part 1: Scale vs. Intimacy
“There is nothing more satisfying than being loved for who you are and nothing more painful than being loved for who you’re not, but are pretending to be.” — Neil Pasricha
The billion dollar problem everyone is trying to figure out on the internet is how to achieve scale. More eyeballs = more success in the internet world. This sphere teaches us to measure our worth based on the magnitude of our reach online.
But scale can quickly evolve from a goal to an obstacle once we achieve it. Scale stifles our creative ability. Once we reach it, we feel strangely obligated to please everyone, at scale. This is a near impossible task when managing an audience of 100, let alone 100,000 or 1,000,000.
Yet, our expectations to please everyone do not shrink as our audience grows.
They grow. Rapidly.
As the scale becomes bigger, the pressure grows larger, and soon enough, there is a paralyzing shadow of darkness on the creative process, preventing us from accessing the creative juices and freedom of thought that gave birth to the early success leading to this scale.
Scale is unnatural.
Our brains are not designed to process what tens of thousands of people might think of what we have to say. Whether they will like it, be offended, get bored, etc. It is an impossible task to appeal to everyone with every piece of content. Yet, this is the pressure we feel at scale.
While it’s difficult to reprogram how our brain reacts to communicating with unimaginable quantities of people, what we can re-program is the goal.
What we crave is intimacy, in all aspects of our lives. In real life friendships, and in relationships with online creators — we like to feel intimately connected to them.
The prerequisite to intimacy is comfort and relaxation from both parties.
When paralyzed by a large-scale audience attracted through virality, this intimacy is out of reach for both the audience and creator. But when we focus on scaling an audience slowly, steadily, intimately — through opt-in private newsletters, 1:1 conversations, and private spaces like Patreon, we can actually build a relationship with an online community to achieve this intimacy.
The aim, then, should not be optimizing for scale, but optimizing for intimacy at a scale where creating still feels enjoyable, manageable, and worthwhile.
Part 2: Fame vs. Privacy
“It takes a very strange person to enjoy fame, with all the bi-products that come with it. It’s not necessarily a thrill.” — Kelsey Grammer
Fame is a melting pot of some of the most primal human urges and desires: attention, envy, influence, power.
Mostly though, fame is a signal of dominance — of having ‘made it’. It’s one of the easiest ways to signal you’ve climbed the societal hierarchy.
But with fame comes an expensive cost: the loss of privacy — of anonymity.
When a famous person walks into a room, everyone has an impression of them before they introduce themselves. They know about their personal life, they can easily summon intimate details one might typically take months to share in a friendship.
Everything is out there for the taking on the internet.
One of the most culturally iconic and unforgettable examples of instant fame followed by a complete loss of privacy was none other than Monica Lewinsky.
No one knows what it’s like to go viral overnight and helplessly watch your entire private life get ripped open by hungry internet vultures quite like Monica.
“I was Patient Zero. The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the internet.”
— Monica Lewinsky
Fame is irreversible. It is permanent. And the loss of your freedom and privacy is like “standing naked in front of the world,” as Monica put it.
There is not much that can be done to stop the momentum once the internet has identified its next piece of prey.
One way to avoid being the object of an internet feast is to avoid sharing private details about your life, unless you want to make your personal life a core tenant of your content. Once you let your audience into your home, they will constantly expect more of it. Your privacy is precious, and nearly impossible to retrieve once it’s been taken from you.
For the many of us who treasure our privacy, it is an important side effect of virality to consider when deciding to aim for it.
Meaningful content doesn’t rely on exposing yourself. It relies on time, effort, and intention to create content that will resonate personally, while remaining universal enough such that it doesn’t require intimate details of your life to be included.
Aiming at virality could come at the cost of privacy — a luxury all of us experience unknowingly until we lose it.
Part 3: Speed vs. Velocity
“Direction is more important than speed. Many are going nowhere fast.” — Barry Demp
Most internet-gurus who preach virality will say: just keep making content. Pump and pump and pump and pump out content. Then pump out some more. Articles, tweets, videos, podcasts, etc.
Whatever your medium is: just keep creating.
While this is good advice if you have already decided on the direction you want to create content in, the advice can actually be detrimental if you’re unsure of what you want to do or where you want to start.
Herein lies the difference between speed and velocity (please allow me to flex some engineering knowledge so I don’t feel like I got my degree for nothing 😊).
Velocity is what’s known as a vector, whereas speed is a scalar.
The key difference between the two is that velocity has magnitude (how fast you’re going) and direction (where you are aiming), whereas speed only has a magnitude (how fast you are going), and does not have the accompanying direction.
The red squiggle is what rapid, unrelenting content creation in an unknown direction looks like. You could be going forwards, backwards, or in circles with respect to where you actually want to go, but you have no idea where you’ll end up because you haven’t set your aim.
Creating content with velocity however, requires you to first aim in a direction, and then start walking in that direction. It might take you some more time to conjure up your aim and the type of content you want to create, but the reward is that when something catches fire, the new audience members it attracts will look back on your previous work and understand your aim. There will be a theme, a brand — a flavour that runs through it all. And they will stick around to keep munching on whatever it is you’re cheffing up.
When you know where you’re aiming, the audience knows it too. When you’re not sure of your direction, the audience can feel the chaos in your content, and can’t be sure what they’d be sticking around for.
Speed gets you nowhere, fast. Velocity gets you to where you want to go.
Set an aim, then create.
Virality isn’t the problem, aiming at it is
When aiming at virality, it is the pillars of quantity that make up our behaviour on the internet. Focusing on quantity — on scale, fame, and speed — erodes our desire to be creative and traps us in a state of disconnection from our digital world.
The true joys of creating on the internet lie in the intimacy of creating content that feels true to us, and could be valuable to a group of individuals that we specifically want to reach.
To find your tribe online — the people that will make creating for them fun — forget about virality, and instead determine who you want to create for and what you want to create. Only then should you begin creating content true to yourself, in this direction.
When you focus on alignment instead of virality, you will find more meaning, joy, and fulfillment in your creative process. You will also never have to deal with the dark side of targeting virality: a lack of intimacy with your audience, the robbery of personal privacy, and the painful sense of urgency to produce rapid, unrelenting content in a directions you’re unsure of.
Then, if the lightning bolt of virality strikes a piece of your content, it is your people that will be attracted into your digital universe. Your content will appeal to the individuals you are creating it for, and the rest will fall away like excess cookie dough around a cookie cutter.
When we focus on what genuinely makes our soul hum in alignment, we begin to inch closer to the pillars of quality: intimacy, privacy and velocity, all of which get us closer to where we want to go in the long term.
It turns out that in life, and on the internet — quality trumps quantity.
Every time.
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