How 1000+ likes made me question my relationship with social media …
TL;DR — Your most popular work on the internet often doesn’t align with what you’re most proud of.
Who doesn’t enjoy getting “likes” on their material? It’s hard to believe the like button is less than 10 years old, but it’s hard to imagine social media without it.
A like to your comment or link means that other people appreciated it, it’s a way of giving kudos and saying thanks. Well liked material gives us a sense of reward, a feeling we have reach, and a little kick of pleasure.
Last week though I found myself questioning this, as a humorous comment of mine seemed to go a little viral. It began with the following Tweet …
Like a lot of people, I can’t resist attempting humour (one of my best friends at University was a stand up comic). I was particularly taken with Justin’s child having a tantrum which reminded me of a certain current American head of state …
So I had the perfect response …
It has fast become my most liked Tweet, by a serious margin. Every time I’ve checked my feed my notifications has been full of …
In fact, it’s somewhat took over my Twitter account.
It has both fascinated me and made me reflective is thinking about the whole psychology of likes. I’m really pleased that people have enjoyed it. I’m used to writing things that people will tell me in person is very witty, but doesn’t always rate with many likes. Don’t we all want to be liked?
What’s unnerving to me, as fun as that post is, and it seemed to have got me a few followers, it’s not what I’m about. I write both on Medium and Twitter about a lot of things — I have an interest range which is probably a little too broad. I talk a lot about my job in IT, but also about ideas of fairness & justice, human nature & critical thinking and of course mental health. I retweet and promote anything that moves me or teaches me — it can be someone’s testimony, a piece of art, or an event on history.
But somehow my most liked post (by a factor of about 10) unnerves me. Especially with algorithms such as those used for Facebook celebration videos they dwell on your most popular — this post was your most liked, this is the post most people replied to.
As always though, there’s a gulf somewhat between what people seem to like, and the piece that you’ve written which was most significant and important to you. The problem is there’s no social media metric for this.
Last year I wrote a lot about aspects of AI, which I got to work on a little, as well as go to Agile Testing Days to do a workshop on. When at the end of the year my friend Angie Jones put up a tweet asking testers what their key blogs of the year were, I included a few items to her … but in private, I told her about the writing I was proudest of in 2017. It was a post called “That awkward, icky conversation … love”.
It was a deeply personal story, about how as the father to a young man about to go out into the world, I felt the need to have a talk to him about love. Not sex — we’d covered that years before. But about love, what it’s like when you’re attracted to someone, but particularly how it can hurt.
It was a conversation which was deeply important to me that we had. It’s a very emotional read, and people who’ve read it have told me they’ve been really moved by it. Interestingly people will tell me about how it touched them, but they don’t hit the like button, because they want to give more personal feedback.
Angie herself told me it was a great article, but questioned me on why I didn’t add it to her link. My reply was it wasn’t a testing article, and I’ve had some flak for posting non-testing material in the past. But it’s great to have encouraging friends like her to remind me “screw those guys”.
In the past some of my most read articles on my various blog platforms have been about the battle against ISTQB certification, how we adopted exploratory testing, and some of my writing — there are readership statistics to back this up.
Here though are the top three articles I’ve written by how much they mean to me,
“That awkward, icky conversation … love” — this post comes straight from the heart, and feels like the pinnacle of being a parent. Preparing them for how relationships aren’t quite like in books or the movies, and how as wonderful as love can be, it has a dark side.
“The road not travelled” — I’ve often been moved by the news and felt the need to write about it to make sense of it. This was a deeply personal piece about a girl who I was smitten with at University, who could have been the girl out of James Blunt’s “You’re beautiful”. But the awful realisation 20 years on that she was part of a terrorist group who were responsible for the murder of 10 people in Germany.
“The Kobayashi Maru of Office Relationships” — I had a really crappy week on a project, and intended to come online and blow off steam about it. Instead I wrote an analytical piece about working with office dynamics which shaped how I dealt with them in future.
So where does this leave me? Ironically, another piece of my Twitter humour is going viral right now …
Is the easy way to farming like on social media me applying more humorous sass online? I love humour (although ironically I take comedy really seriously), but ultimately there’s something more rewarding about exploring ideas in depth.
This article’s a reminder that as much as I enjoy social media, the need to be online, to write, to engage is deeper than likes. It’s a personal thing, a growth thing.
