There was a recent discussion on tumblr, which I didn’t reblog for obvious reasons, about how people with a large readership cope with a heavy interaction load – how the person would be anxious if they dealt with that volume of notes on each post, that amount of interaction and contact. I was tagged in it because of my habit of “lochnessing”, where I cause an activity spike on posts I reblog that looks like the loch ness monster.
It never occurs to me, because I’ve dealt with high-volume social media for so long – realistically about ten years, probably closer to fifteen – that it’s difficult for people to handle that, because they don’t have the systems in place that I do. I mean it does occur to me in the sense that I have become more cautious about what I reblog and its impact on the OP; there are things I’d like to share with you but don’t because I recognize it would be harmful to the person who wrote them. But it doesn’t occur to me that someone might struggle with a high volume of notes purely because it’s a volume that they don’t have a system in place to deal with the way I do.
So I said I’d do a writeup on the “entire ecosystems” I had in place for handling the high volume of interaction I receive online. I sit at a weird place where I’m not so well known that I can just ignore most of what comes at me with impunity because everyone acknowledges I can’t answer it all, like say a youtube star. But at the same time I do get too much attention to return it at the same level I receive it. I am one and you are sixteen thousand. So I had to make systems to return as much as I could and feel okay about not returning the rest.
Reading through this, of course it sounds like a weird humblebrag: “Here’s how I deal with my MASSIVE POPULARITY”. There’s no real way around that; I can’t talk about how I deal with comments without talking about how I get a disproportionately high number of them. The fact that I do is what leads me to do things like the Zero Comment Challenge, or Radio Free Monday, to try and balance shit out. So, as I mention occasionally below, you can think I’m an asshole for talking about how I am popular, but I can’t talk about how to deal with that popularity without acknowledging the reality of it, and someone somewhere’s gonna think I’m an asshole anyway, so whatever.
These are the systems I use to manage my life – work, play, the weird inbetween space that’s kind of both. Many of these are akin to the systems that I use in managing my depression, in that they involve a lot of small steps building up to a big result, but each small step on its own is manageable.
Tumblr Exodus 