"Fred is a writer, house husband, and dog dad. When not managing treat distribution and meeting tummy scratch quotas, he enjoys playing video games, reading, and furthering the Trans Agenda."


A lot of ppl on here feel entitled to engagement. Or maybe that's harsh, and it could also be said their GOAL with their social media use is engagement. I would love a lot of validation of every post I put on here, and also I just assume it's not happening. Maybe I'm in the wrong tbh, or maybe I'm not being honest with myself.


When my reblog of Jae's Ask got a little bit of traction yesterday, I was kind of stressed, and kept refreshing to make sure if things got nasty I could block or delete or reply asap. (Don't anyone say "not on Cohost!" bc we know damn well many ppl have already been harassed on here lol).

Anyway, generally I feel like my social media goal is to find new cool people to interact like a human with (asking for friendship seems a step too far but "mutuals" is a cool level to find via posting sites, I think) and also see funny memes, and also if every once in awhile I feel like I've said something really funny, if I do see an encouraging amount of "number go up" then yeah, that'd be nice, but you know I don't put myself out there very often (e.g. tags, reblogs, comments) so that's unlikely. On the flip side I think historically I probably post too transparently, on here especially, and kind of hope to stay in the woodwork so to speak bc maybe there's some old posts I should actually delete :host-nervous:

All to say, I read a really good post about how condescendingly saying "numbers brainrot" is fucked up, and I think I agree now, AND I still think wanting every post to do numbers and therefore wanting numbers to reflect that is different from my goals here.

Also I did really agree with the point made (again, not trying to engage too much, so you can scroll @/warc's profile yourself to find the salient points) that we ARE getting "numbers" right now in either "long line of notifs" or "short line of notifs" and just not putting an actual number on the line is kind of just a QOL/UX miss. Like if we're going no numbers, then baby let's go 0 fuckin numbers ya know? I'd love to see what that's like.

As I'm thinking out loud though, isn't every social site ever about engagement? Interactions, connections? So every site even before the Big Social Media sites did/does have like...even a fuckin visitor counter. Even a quantified notification like "hey your livejournal post has 10 waiting comments" (maybe that's where my poor poster self-esteem was born - as IF any of my livejournal posts ever got 10 comments lmao). Anyway, another tally for "numbering engagements isn't 'brainrot' - it's how people efficiently get information from the platform about how they have engaged with the community."

This is all deeply interesting to me and not upsetting but now I will close out by tagging this all the things I think people have muted about this topic.


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