We live in an ecosystem, where everyone is pressured to be a content creator of some sort.

Suppose you want to interact with your friends on the internet. Let’s say they hang out on BlueSky or LiveJournal or whatever. So you go to those platforms, post some stuff you think your friends will like. And you have like 10 friends, so your posts get 10 views. But that’s not very good! You want your posts to be more widely read by strangers on the internet. So you put a bit more effort into being witty, so you can get 100 views, then 1000 views, and so on. And it’s never good enough because you read even wittier posts from other people, with 100 times the views that you get.

I describe internet popularity as “scale-free” because everything is on a logarithmic scale. No matter where you are in terms of popularity, you feel like a small fish in a big pond. You see other people on the internet with 100 times the popularity you have, so you understand your own little corner of the internet to be a backwater.

I’m drawing upon the idea of a “scale-free network“. A network is a series of nodes, and connections between those nodes. In a scale-free network, the number of connections to any given node follows a power law distribution. In other words, connections occur on a logarithmic scale. I don’t know if social media platforms are scale-free in the strict mathematical sense, but I feel it’s an effective metaphor to understand what’s going on.

One of the problems with internet popularity, is the “friendship paradox”. The friendship paradox says that on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Almost everyone is below average in terms of number of friends. How can this be possible? You’re more likely to be friends with people who have lots of friends, on account of they have lots of friends. Similarly, everyone on the internet is made to feel they are below average in popularity.

To escape from the hell of scale-free popularity, it’s worth pointing out that there are a couple important scales, which may serve as “anchors” to our understanding.

The first scale: How much time did you spend writing something, compared to the time others spent reading it?

To invent some totally fictitious numbers, suppose I spend 5 hours writing an essay. And then each reader spends about 2 minutes reading it. And I get 100 readers. I spent 5 hours, and the readers spent 3 hours and 20 minutes. So I actually spent more time on it than my readers did. So let me ask, how much obligation do I have to my readers, vs the obligation to myself? If I spent more time on it than readers did, I feel more empowered to write what I enjoy writing, not necessarily stuff that readers enjoy reading.

The second scale: How much time did you spend making something, compared to the amount of money you’re getting out of it?

Suppose I make a video, it’s 10 minutes long. Let’s say it takes 10 hours to record and 10 hours to edit. I get 100,000 views, and I get paid 1 cent per view. So 20 hours for $1000, with an implied hourly rate of $50. That’s a livable wage. But if I get 1000 views, that’s an implied hourly rate of $0.50, which is not a livable wage. So the absolute number of views does in fact matter, if you’re trying to make a living. But most of us are not trying to make a living on the internet.

So when I look at my internet output, I see myself as close to the threshold. The time I put into it is comparable to or more than the time readers put into it. And I’m fine with that! It’s more than I could hope for, really. I don’t need to compare my popularity to other folks on the internet, I can ground it in terms of what I have and what I want.