I Know I Shouldn't Care About This

& really, I don't.  I just find it weird & fascinating & hope it's not doing too much damage to my already crippled self-esteem.

But first, a prologue.  A while ago, I was involved in a Usenet group onto which I very irresponsibly dumped lots of bad poetry.  (Bad poetry, as always, available on request.)  As an experiment, one summer, when I had time, I spent a couple of months archiving posts I liked.  It was a little exhausting, as I felt the need to read everything, something I never did before, because I wanted to be fair.  I hand-coded the page, found dumb images, commented on the posts, etc.  Because I had discovered an easy way to put a counter on the page, I added a counter, mainly to have the phrase "[counter number] of people are checking here today to see if I liked their posts" or something like that.

One of the members of the newsgroup, someone I never had any contact with, laughed at the counter number, & boasted that his (I think it was a he) websites got thousands of millions of hits!  It was, in the terms of the newsgroup world, dicksizing, but for some reason, since the website wasn't supposed to be for anyone but the small group of Usenet folks, I felt misunderstood & hurt by the reaction.

(Also, when I stopped doing it, another person, who must have thought I meant to do it forever, wrote something like, "Ha ha, I knew you couldn't maintain this!"  It was one of my first experiences in the weird world of people rooting for you to fail.)

It's more than a decade later, & while no one (as far as I know) is paying any attention to this but me, I have both a Facebook page & a Twitter page.  Both are linked to my regular web page, which, you will note, does not have a counter on it.  I learn my lessons!

My Facebook page has currently has 246 "likes."  A little over half of those "likes" are friends of mine on Facebook whom I requested "like" the page.  When I get new "likes," it's pretty exciting.  But here's a weird thing: two weeks ago, I had 253 "likes."  What's happening?

My Twitter page has currently 255 "followers."  I think using the word "follower" is a little bizarre, because it makes one sound like one is starting a cult or something, & most of my "followers" on Twitter are not fans of my show.  Many of them are people who just reciprocal "follows" with me.  A lot of them are bands or labels whom I've supported by playing them on the radio.  I "follow" more than twice as many people on Twitter than "follow" me.

The point is: it disturbs me that I seem to be losing "likes" on Facebook, which is a more personal social media site, than I have "followers" on Twitter.  It disturbs me not in a "what can I do about this?" sort of way, but in a "why is this happening?" sort of way.  Because I know I should not give a shit.  & I do my best to not give a shit.  (Which is good for my self-esteem.)

Here's an example of something I didn't take personally: I have a friend, or more an acquaintance, really, who I knew in Austin, who now lives in Chicago & writes for the the AV Club.  He's a very good writer & I enjoy his work a lot.  He used to have a couple of bands in Austin, both of whom I really dug.  I recently played one of them on the radio, & tagged him (or whatever you call it when you @thenameoftheperson in your tweet), & he responded humorously, & "followed" me, & almost immediately "unfollowed" me.

I was not in the slightest bit offended.  It seemed to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Wait a second.  I just happened to notice something Facebook has written, when I was looking at page "insights":

"We’ve recently updated the way we measure how many people like your Page. Pages may see a decrease in likes after March 12, when we removed likes from inactive Facebook accounts."

Oh.  I see.  Then this whole thing I've written has been a waste of time.

Well!  It's a good thing no one reads this blog!