Here's a Conundrum

A clickcount temptation

A few days ago I wrote an I hope jocular but critical update about the current Vice President on the United States and his very insensitive, ignorant and arrogant attitude to a country he has pontificated about but clearly doesn’t understand. The country I live in.

That, and the disgraceful behaviour of his enormous retinue of heavily armed guards and their massive fleet of ugly enormous cars.

I wrote it because the events I referred to happened very near where I live, and took place at a particularly iconic venue.

I didn’t write it to get more clicks, as with every one of the 131 updates/blogs/articles I have written on Substack, I do it when the mood takes me and I have something to say.

I’ve been using Substack since July 2021, so just over 4 years and nothing like this has happened before.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy trying to communicate a view which may not be orthodox but is based on sixty nine and a half years of experience. I write it with the full and deep understanding that my views do not hold any more weight than anyone else’s, I try to be balanced and informative as well as slightly entertaining.

So that’s why it has been a bit of a shock to see what happened with my last post. The graph below gives some indication of what happened.

As you can see, my average number of readers for anything I’ve written garners between 2 to 3 thousand readers, as you can also see the posts aren’t regular. Apparently they should be if you really want to build an audience.

My updates are sporadic and chaotic, a bit like my life. I post them and move on.

But the one I wrote about the VP passed 3,000 reads in the first 30 minutes of me publishing it. It’s now passed 12,500 reads, and truly, I have no idea how or why. Do people share it with their pals in what is the equivalent of word of mouth. Or has Substack promoted the post for some reason? I genuinely don ‘t understand it, but then again, as I’ve stated in previous posts on here, I’ve kind of reached the limit of my understanding of the latest technology. I’ve heard of the word algorithm but all I really know is quite evil little shitters a quarter my age who can sit on a beanbag with a laptop are far too powerful for the rest of us poor suckers.

But here’s the curse. I noticed. I’m not going to lie, it was a good feeling to see something you’ve written getting this kind of attention. But I have no idea how to do that again. And I also don’t want to do all the things the annoying people/bots/con artists who spam me all the time explaining how they can help me get millions of views/reads/likes on the Everything Electric Show etc.

So I am now trying not to think about what I might write next that will get a similar response. I want to hold hard to the way I’ve used this Substack malarky up to now, writing about a topic I have some knowledge of or interest in, or an opinion I’ve long held that has been repeatedly challenged and I have worked out what I really think.

So I have to be really careful, and also not worry about things like view counts/subscriber numbers and all the annoying dopamine hit nonsense I hear social media professionals pontificate about.

The one advantage I have is experience. I know what it’s like to have some success, (I’m talking other work I have done, not substack) and repeated abject failures, far more of the latter.

It genuinely doesn’t matter, if a billion people had read that little piece it still doesn’t matter. In 6 months it would be 100% irrelevant and anyway the tragic little weirdo who came to the bloody Cotswolds will be booted out of office and saying a bunch of different offensive pig ignorant things about something else.

Oh wait, I looked after pigs on a farm many years ago, they are very intelligent creatures.

And for no reason other than these images relate to various social media platforms are 4 pictures of a mechanoid suffering from 3.2 millions years of droid rot.