esselfortium

@esselfortium

she/her
esselfortium.bandcamp.com/

composer, texture artist, doom mapper, person

esselfortium @esselfortium7/5/2023, 4:08 AM

X @xkeeper

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:01 AM

Numbers as a self employed creative

Edit: Locking this post because I don't feel like having this discussion anymore

I guess cohost never plans on actually implementing any kind of numbers or metrics, but I'm just like, I dont know lmao

You can only see how well a post did by using your notifications, and only at that time. You'll never again have access to know if people actually liked a post. Also, after 10 or so likes, it becomes a vague "a lot" which yea, 10 is a lot! But when I can post on Mastodon or Twitter and get 200 likes, the vagueness becomes frustrating, because there's a big difference between "a few people liked this" and "a lot of people liked this."

Maybe I've got some kind of number brainrot. Honestly, the numbers aren't even important to me. I don't care what numbers other people have, and I don't care to share my numbers with them. I just like to know that I'm not posting into the infinite void on this site, or getting my posts liked by the 10 or so people that follow me (I don't even know how many people follow me on this site, so I never know if posting is worthwhile or not)

They say, well maybe they will give some numbers to businesses. What's a business? A brand? Is Pepsi gonna get the numbers? Will they even think to bestow numbers onto a lowly self employed artist like me, who just needs to know if posting to Cohost is a worthwhile investment of my time or not?

I think that's just what I want to know, if posting on Cohost is even worth my time or not, or if I should just focus on platforms where I know people actually like looking at my stuff.

(for the record, on Mastodon at least I get a lot of likes and I get a lot of replies, so the whole "no numbers means you have to reply more" doesn't hold weight with me.)

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in reply to @CyanSorcery's post:

X @xkeeper7/5/2023, 2:04 AM

"if you're just posting, you don't get shit" really sort of sums up this website

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:05 AM

yep, that's the part that really got me lol

X @xkeeper7/5/2023, 2:12 AM

honestly i was just left speechless, or at least some stuff i said on masto and not here

Yaodema @yaodema7/5/2023, 2:12 AM

yeah I'm still baffled by how resistant they are to even like... showing likes to the person who made the post, ~~or seemingly, to showing the shares of a post and the chain of who shared it to get to the version you're now looking at.~~ this is all data they have in their back-end, they're just choosing not to display it, seems like.

showing like counts to the person who made the post, and making it something they can turn on or off, gets rid of pointless bragging while still making it possible to tell if something's gotten good attention or not. so, why...?

(edited because jae says that share chains are info that is planned and I want to be accurate)

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:26 AM

yea like, I'm not asking for the big numbers to show to everyone, I just want to know that people like what I'm posting besides "a couple liked it" and "a lot liked it" because they're both frustratingly vague

gender reveal maenad @phorusrhacid7/5/2023, 2:31 AM

Having access to any sort of analytics is just like, good to me. I can respect wanting to obfuscate numbers other people are getting from people and I can completely respect putting numbers away in a corner of a settings page somewhere so you have to go out of your way to see them. Like, hell, twitch recently started more aggressively directing streamers to their stream statistics and that sucks a lot. I don't want something like that here. But I also thought the old twitch analytics page was totally fine and useful and I guess I was kinda hoping the opposition to having anything was a bit less ideological?

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:32 AM

Yea definitely, like, a dedicated page where you can go look but otherwise you don't see them on individual posts, and also no one else can see them, would be the perfect solution

Video Cathunk @Exameter7/5/2023, 6:14 AM

Honestly I have been thinking the same. I know I've definitely been one of the people sorta memeing about "numbers addiction" but I do sorta silently append "public" to those and never think to speak up about the instances where the numbers do matter.

It feels like that would be a perfectly reasonable compromise that doesn't undermine the central ideal of the site, but like the discourse can be very... uneven. I think people maybe define their own community here a bit too much about being "a website."

Violet @OniLink7/5/2023, 2:37 AM

i don't understand this criticism? the idea that you shouldn't see engagement metrics is, to my understanding, a core design point of cohost as a platform. i feel like staff has been pretty clear on that from day 1 - this website is opposed to showing those numbers on a fundamental level.

the criticism just kinda comes across to me like walking into soup store and trying to buy clothing.

edit: i missed the post from @jkap i may be not fully informed on this particular topic in that case

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:41 AM

one of the other core design philosophies of this site is supposed to be to help creatives succeed, especially with the upcoming tipping and other patreon-like features. They want to allow creatives to succeed on this site, but one important part of that is just knowing what content you're putting out there is something that people are actually interested in or not, so you can know what your audience is into and put more of that. It's like if I looked at my game's wishlists on Steam and it just said that I had "a lot of them." Good luck to me trying to impress publishers and other business partners with that

[deleted]7/5/2023, 2:45 AM

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 2:57 AM

because once I've posted something else, those notifications are gone forever, and I have a terrible memory, so all I can do is look at past posts and go "no one liked them actually" because I can't remember what posts people actually liked or not (and shouldn't have to)

Connor The Braixen Dreamer @SeafoamGaming7/5/2023, 4:07 AM

hi, freelance writer here. A numbers page (even if not in my face, but something i could only look at if i go out of my way in an options panel or something) would do pretty good for helping me know what stuff I share is a hit with the crowd here: ie, should i share more of my YT content? my reviews? my interviews? my big longer writings? my shorter ones? etc etc. Knowing which does more in general and which gets seen more in the tags lets me know which of my stuff is working and thus, would set a nice posting rhythm to not worry about

at this point i'm throwing darts at a wall and have grown more irked at this place as my friends are here but a lot of them have left/forgotten this site due to the lack of engagement/recommendations and not knowing what direction to share their work. FA Journals have zero way of being searched at all, but those at least I feel were OK to work with as it would automatically notify all of your watchers, while if someone were to not log on for a few days... they may miss my posts due to their feed pushing it out. (This is also true for twitter tbf but there you could at least have a dedicated notification for when a creator you liked posted for the first time in a while, while here I only get notified if a friend replies/likes/reposts to me)

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 4:10 AM

yea you get it 100%

Connor The Braixen Dreamer @SeafoamGaming7/5/2023, 4:20 AM

I really do thank you for saying that since lately the past few days it really feels like some people are so baffled why people would want numbers or algo or at least some sort of way to know our stuff is even being seen: I know indeed this ain't a twitter replacement! and i know it's smaller scale! but if my posts dont even get seen by 1% of this small scale website because i made an oopsie poopsie on a tag I'd at least like to know if that post did so in order for me to do better next time so my freelancer work could at least maybe find a niche here.

Learning reblogging existing posts and adding tags does not in fact, put that post in the tag search (meaning if you reblog a post with no tags it won't get seen in search even if you added a tag in your reblog, period) really soured my mood and even moreso with how the admins are joking about numbers being not that big of a deal as they bleed money

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery7/5/2023, 4:27 AM

reblogging existing posts and adding tags doesn't add them to the tag feed??? so that's what that was about earlier, I saw something but I didn't understand it at the time

man, haha

walking mirage @atomicthumbs7/5/2023, 4:34 AM

that last bit was a deliberate change to prevent people from tagging other people's posts with things they don't want and getting them entered in tag feeds, basically making them indexed without the OP's consent

[also i deleted my comments upthread because i am not invested enough in my opinion here to want to get notifications from fired-up folks about it; y'all's thoughts here are valid and i respect that]

Connor The Braixen Dreamer @SeafoamGaming7/5/2023, 11:54 AM

Considering how i reblogged my own post with extra tags because i forgot it the first time, wondered why my PMD Vid wasnt getting seem at all, and only learned this was a “feature” via a venting post from someone else… (Basically meaning my efforts to “bump” my post was pointless) yeah that’s a cringe feature LMFAO

Yaodema @yaodema7/5/2023, 5:48 AM

well, this helps explain the comment you'd made on my earlier bit about how folks should "just post." I'll note that one was because people seemed uncertain what to do here. folks afraid they need to be CSS wizards to post here was a common issue in some waves. folks thinking "you gotta put a ton of effort in" too. so I wanted to get to those folks first. the follow-up post was just detailing the old "more folks will notice you if you like and boost their posts" thing.

I hadn't intended any kind of advice for how to get seen fast or get around the lack of into about what tags people actually search, or how much people liked a post of yours, etc. some of these are hard to answer, and some are currently impossible. I get grumpy about the lack of info thing, and I don't think it's being taken seriously enough by some of the staff. we'll see if it changes.

the reblogging and adding tags doesn't add to the tag feed is, baffling, especially since doing that hides the tags from the OP, so if it's a deliberate action done to prevent the post from showing up on tag feeds against a user's wishes, I'd think privacy settings would be better here? also why let empty posts have tags at all if they're not having an effect? I have to be missing something, otherwise that just seems half-baked at best.

(sorry for longposting in your comments again Roxy ack)

Connor The Braixen Dreamer @SeafoamGaming7/5/2023, 11:59 AM

Yeah no worries, I wasn’t upset at you about that or anything: just a thing I generally vented about since i’ve been trying to do my freelancer stuff here for… 7 months now i think? So it’s been a good chunk of the site’s history yet i still feel like I can’t grasp this site’s way of getting out there

kastelpls @highimpactsex7/5/2023, 4:48 AM

my impression of cohost is that it’s trying to be like friendster and livejournal — a place for people to hang out — but it’s clearly becoming a space for creatives to promote their work like a twitter or rss feed.

some people do adapt to this and i’m not like into analytics, but i do think some form of metrics helps creators out. i legit can’t tell what people are interested in seeing.

it’d be nice if cohost staff can talk to creatives and figure out what’s a good balance between metrics, privacy, and number brainrot. atm the total silence means you aren’t sure if promoting here is fine. it works well as a social media space to goof off, but creatives who wanna show their work to the world need a little bit of the numbers.

dante, personally @dante7/5/2023, 1:19 PM

Where are you getting the idea that cohost never plans to include any metrics? I believe the plan is and has generally always been to include metrics of some sort to those who need then, but to limit the pervasiveness of metrics in public (i.e. no public like counts, but probably a Metrics Page for those that need it).

ela @eladnarra7/5/2023, 1:35 PM

Yeah, I'm honestly at a loss how "we plan on having some metrics for creatives and businesses, but if you're just posting for fun you don't get those" turns into "no metrics ever." It seems that at least one member of staff wants to restrict metrics to people using the eventual subscribtion features, but apparently not all staff feel that way and there will be a time for feedback.