I want stars, not spotlights
Well, last week was a bit of a roller-coaster ride, for both the blog and me overall.
And now, having started the roller-coaster analogy, I don't know if the good bits will be the getting up to the heights, the bad bits are when you hit the lows again, or in fact being pulled upwards towards the heights is the slow and frustrating bad thing and the good fun bit is the hurtling at speed down to the bottom. Hmm...
There were both highs and lows last week.
The highs – at first – was hitting the Bear discover Trending page, which comes as you accumulate both visitor numbers and some 'toasts', or 'upvotes' – or in my case 'stars'.
Very exciting, seeing visitor numbers then start to shoot up past ten, through the hundreds, and go on toward 400 in a day. Whew. And a lot of them pressed the star button too.
Then I posted another thing just two days later – with views still in the hundreds per day – and that one started getting attention as well. The week had officially 'gone a bit mad', with two of my posts in the top ten at the same time.
Which is all very... odd. Did I really want that much attention? I had mixed feelings. From ten views a week to getting into the thousands.
The stats page, normally a large acreage of white blankness, had got a bit overwhelming for me.
But I plugged on and produced another post by the end of that week. And next came the plummeting low, after all the temporary attention finally died down a little, and that post got the traditional reaction of... well, silence.
You feel like you might have suddenly gone a bit wrong in some way. The same me. The same style of writing. It must have been as good (or bad) as the ones that were seemingly loved.
But where have all my new fans gone? What have I done? Is it me? Was that post too rubbish even for them now?
And why exactly do I apparently care now?
I didn't before. I'm only in this for a laugh, for a fun way of passing the time and messing about. Why am I now worrying what the reaction to what I post is?
I can see I'm too fragile for this roller-coaster. Whichever bit, ups, downs, peaks or troughs, is the good or bad bit.
As I understand it, you can hide the toast/upvote/star on your posts entirely, and opt out of being on the Discover or Trending feeds, but I don't want to disable both because I like people being able to show they liked a post. It makes me smile if I think they smiled.
Being on Trending is like having a high lumen spotlight suddenly switched on, and leaving you feeling that you are now a (temporary) star performer who now has a certain standard to maintain, when you were happy being relatively unseen in the wings before.
I think I would like some halfway choice, where I can opt out of getting on to the Trending pages, but still be on the Recent posts list and let people tell me they liked the post.
This way I can have my visitor statistics and the little stars for people to press, for giving me the occasional little bit of a warm glow, but without the spotlight operator being told.
post link for sharing: https://skryblans.com/i-want-stars-not-spotlights
If you got this far, you may as well click the star below on your way out. But don't do that if there are already quite a lot.