Matthew Cole

Full, full agree on this as an ex-social media manager. A lot of my teams are just now letting me consider opening some Cohost pages for them because they're convinced that Cohost doesn't give them visibility. It does! It gives meaningful "engagement"! But it isn't something we can quantify with Numbers at the moment so I can't convince them easily.

I worked at Gizmodo Media Group, and let me tell you, Chartbeat's primary purpose seemed to be to inflict Frenzy damage, so, yes

to add a story from personal experience, every time I would approach a round number of followers on twitter, even as someone whose personal relationship to twitter was "weird hobby", I would get super uptight and hyperfixated on not tweeting in such a way that that number went down, and would agonize for weeks and weeks over why my follower count wasn't going up

and at some point I would decide that I would never crack that boundary and had come to terms with it, loosen up, and only then post things that fell far enough on the happy side of mid to actually do well

it got bad enough that I had to install Twitter Demetricator to keep it from ruining my mood for days at a time

Honestly, as far as "numbers" go, the only thing I WANT from a system like that is to see who shares/rebugs posts! Doesn't even need to have a number, it could just have "shares" and then a list of folks. (I fully admit this is a tumblr leftover where i like seeing the tags people leave)

Metrics just seem like an arcade game's high score board that ends up driving you bonkers.

I think I broadly agree. I have made several posts that have gone viral and I made posts within my community that were relatively popular. It was annoying to start judging my posts on a for-fun account against my prior metrics. Like "oh no, a smut post I wrote only got 100 likes instead of 200" is kind of terrible for human emotions

Its cool to hear theres some plans for opt-in numbers - it would be great to see that in a non-culture destroying kind of way. Hard design task but i SUPER trust in you lot to pull it off. That said, as the dweeb who is in-charge of the Necrosoft Games page - i realllly hope any numbers™ you do end up implementing can work on projects that dont offer user subscriptions, because as a studio thats not something we will be do! Any numbers we can get can be helpful for figuring out if were doing a good job with the whole telling people about our games thing, so yeah having access to that without subs would be nice. Even if they are massively restrictive! Just getting that vague sense of "yeah this is working" is great - having live view counts on everything (like twitter right now) is uhhh.. not good!

Thats part of the reason why every post we make about a Necrosoft game here has an embedded steam widget, as then we get steam (bad) visitor data. That gives us a real rough idea of "well" our cohost presence is doing vs our other social network things. When i checked the backend last week (just before big business baby had his last cool idea) twitter was only doing about 10x better than cohost... which is an incredible win for our posts here i think. (thoes numbers rely on steams UTM tracking feature which does admittedly suck ass and not work for like, 90% of visits. Most of the untracked visits are probably twitter related.... but it does tell us enough to know that yeah, we need to keep making optimizing gifs for cohost)

I'd personally not mind having access to a backend section, like Wordpress's, where someone can see numbers. But I am basically to the point where I want to see nothing else lol. Like I don't even want to know what people say in the comments of reposts of my stuff really, I'm now hardcore un-numbered or something 😂

Fwiw I do in fact have to make some of my money online and will probably use the subscription thing when it rolls out.

What might be interesting is if I can turn off all outward facing numbers on my posts even if others who repost them have their numbers turned on? I don't know, I'm thinking out loud with my thumbs here

To me, the interesting thing is that (most) metrics are only meaningful if you want to game an algorithm, so that you can A/B test posts and see what the algorithm prefers. Without the algorithm (or a willingness to game it), the numbers don't tell you anything deeper than like/reply/follow numbers already do, and they make people feel neurotic when the numbers do something weird.

The only number that might be interesting (though I'm not a "serious" creator who much cares about my reach, much as I maybe should) on Cohost is probably how interaction breaks down across tags. But even then, that's probably guessable from activity on each tag.

I don't need everyone to see the numbers my posts hit, but I would personally like to be able to see how many followers I have without having to dig through and count the notifications, or how many likes my own posts have gotten without having to do the same.

It's not to chase a high, it's to have any clue if people are actually seeing/enjoying my work or not - not to change what I do if they're not liking it, but to understand if and when I've actually gotten what I want to do in front of the people who will enjoy looking at it.

I respect the desire to try and remove a lot of toxic social media elements from this site's experience, but there are definitely some things that feel necessary for a creator to be able to see.