Audience capture

Audience capture is the part that scares me the most about writing on the internet. I have the soul of an engineer1: when I see a metric like engagement, I want to improve it. I like to make the number go up. In fact, the whole environment of online writing is tailor-made to help you make engagement numbers go up. It’s trivial to find out how many people are reading my posts, and from what sources. Hundreds of link aggregators all over the internet have algorithms that will help my most engagement-friendly posts get views, and the comments are helpfully sorted by upvotes so I can read the “best”2 pieces of feedback straight away. Many platforms are set up to financially reward you for engagement, whether that’s by enabling advertisement or by straight up paying you out. Leaning into this environment is a huge mistake. Views and engagement are valuable to me, but not directly. They are proxy metrics for the things I actually care about: Having smart, informed people read and consider…

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