#oneaday Day 918: Shouting into the void

I'm once again feeling a tad frustrated at how difficult it is to get people to pay attention to things you actually put effort into.

I see it every day, not just from my own tweets but from other people too: genuine tweets inviting people to check out something they've worked hard on get little to no "engagement", while some lazy, mindless meme-of-the-week format gets three bajillion likes and retweets.

It is, I guess, confirmation of what we all half-jokingly say: that the vast majority of people out there on the Internet aren't interested in anything that they have to spend more than two seconds to "engage" with. If it's not an image or a GIF or a fucking TikTok video then they don't care.

As a writer — and as someone who enjoys long-form creative work including both writing and interesting videos — it's frustrating to see, because I know a whole bunch of people who work hard on what they do and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve for what they do. And that, in turn, makes me both frustrated and worried for what I do as a job.

I don't know how to "fix" this, either. It seems to be a cultural shift that has occurred gradually over the course of the last ten years or so; back when I was just blogging about any old thing a decade ago, it was relatively straightforward to get people to pay attention even to my weirdest stuff — and even in the early days of MoeGamer, I picked up a whole bunch of followers. But these days it seems that if you're not a very particular type of person online, you're simply going to "stagnate" in terms of numbers.

Which once again makes me question if social media is even worth it at all — and I'm forced to conclude that, unfortunately, it remains a necessary evil. Because even though it fucking sucks to get people to pay attention to (and, heaven forbid, share) the things you've done, it is at least still a good means of getting in touch with developers and publishers so I have things to write about. And at least those folks are grateful when they get some coverage.

I dunno. I'm grumpy after a few days of both Andie and I feeling rough and I'll probably feel better in the morning, but this evening I'm just feeling frustrated about it all.