Instagram makes me anxious šŸ“·

I get anxious when in real life friends donā€™t like an Instagram photo of mine, especially if it related to work Iā€™m undertaking, I wonder why they didnā€™t spend 2 seconds pressing the heart, did they even see my photo? Donā€™t they know I like to get a like. It makes me worry.

Sometimes I would have conversations about how many followers I had on Twitter and Instagram. Even though I know that many can be bots or that I you can game ways to gain followers. But sometimes I did care, why has he got more followers? Iā€™ve been on twitter for years longer. It made me question my content. Should I have been more canny?

So more and more I really appreciate that micro.blog doesnā€™t show or support any of this. People can favourite posts but you donā€™t know, you canā€™t tell how many people are following you. In fact the delay in extra JavaScript in headings and footers means I canā€™t install Matomo (analytics software thats not Google) and you know what the more I think about it the more I donā€™t want to now.

When someone mentions me on micro.blog the interaction is so much more meaningful than a little heart, thumbs up or a like. Even a RT / Boosted style posting is not possible and so this is normally a mention with effort, real interaction.

Thanks @manton what a good default design decision.

Wherever I can Iā€™m turning off stats, likes and such that I donā€™t need to know. If you want to tell me you liked what I did. Well drop me a line on micro.blog or start a discussion on discourse.

Colin Walker

Absolutely šŸ‘ Focusing on the metrics means we are focusing on the wrong things, letting them drive our decisions. If we just get on and do good work people will notice.

2018-04-10 9:53 am
Aaron Davis

, this reminds me of Bill Ferriter's questions about audience and Harold Jarche's discussion of metrics. I very rarely look at my analytics. What I do is for me firstly, that others may benefit is a bonus of the open web. As Maha Bali points out:

I first fell in love with the web or the open aspect of the web when I was trying to finish my PhD during a time where Egypt had a lot of political conflict and I was unable to leave the house because I had a young child and the library at my institution was closed. I needed some resources, and even though I had access to some online resources, I actually needed some paper based resources that did not exist for free online, and at the time, what I fell in love with was green open access stuff that was placed on repositories, and honestly pirated stuff, that was placed online so that I had some access to some articles and book chapters that I wouldnā€™t normally be able to access from home. And it was that transformative moment for me where I decided that if I publish things, I would like as much as possible for the things that I publish to be openly accessible to other people.

Posted at collect.readwriterespond.com

2018-04-10 2:41 pm

Dr. Adam Procter @adamprocter