CLOSED: [2020-07-08 Wed 08:14]
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 2020-06-26-blog-visibility
:CREATED:  [2020-06-26 Fri 17:41]
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "STARTED"    [2020-07-08 Wed 08:14]
:END:

Recently, I made a small experiment. I wrote [[id:2020-06-14-Zettelkasten-concerns][a blog article with a
slightly provoking title]] very similar to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait][clickbait]]. The target
audience of this article was the Emacs community [[id:tags-emacs][where I contributed
many things]]. Using a provoking title, I tried to trigger a certain
group of Emacs users. The content of the article was not particular
provoking, discussing some - in my opinion - reasonable arguments.

Then I promoted the article solely with [[https://graz.social/@publicvoit/104344441977920252][one toot/tweet]] besides [[id:2017-01-03-how-to-use-this-blog][the
usual Atom feed]]. The echo was poor. As a matter of fact, there was one
single email comment, no comment via Disqus, and nothing substantial
on Twitter/Mastodon.

Whenever an article like that hits the Emacs eco-system, it usually
results in a few comments in the social networks or at least an
occurrence on [[https://sachachua.com/blog/emacs/][Sacha's Emacs news]], a reddit post or even an article on
[[https://irreal.org/blog/][irreal]]. Especially when an article contains provoking or negative
comments of a hyped technology like I wrote.

Having a good visibility is important for content to be found by the
potential readers because there are way too few people using [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)][the power
of RSS/Atom]] to manage their input feed themselves, following my feeds
directly.

In contrast to my personal blog, the number of readers on [[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/][sub-reddits
like this emacs-related one]] is large. Its sub-reddit page lists 41,800
members and the moment where I'm typing these lines, 248 of them were
online - whatever this means.

So I published the [[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/hg2m5s/zettelkastenorgroamorgbrain_is_crap/][very same content on reddit]] as well, when the blog
article was online for twelve days. This way, I can derive some
conclusions when comparing the echo of these two channels.

*** The Clickbait Title

Interestingly, I got several comments related to the title. I noticed
that the reddit karma points did not increase but also decrease from
time to time, indicating that I really got negative feedback as
promised in some comments.

Funny enough, [[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/hg2m5s/zettelkastenorgroamorgbrain_is_crap/fw1x9dq/][somebody even apologized for downvoting]] my article
because he later found out that the article content provided valuable
stuff.

Since I don't use clickbait titles like this, I was hoping for people
to interpret it as some kind of joke. It seems to be the case that
most people from the community still don't recognize my username. They
don't have any relation between my sense of humor and the catchy title
used.

*** Statistics

When I published the article on reddit, the blog article was online
for twelve days and had 1128 hits or 315 visits.

After another twelve days, the article got 1916 hits and 502
visits in total. On reddit, I got dozens of comments.
Various discussions were happening and some comments even claimed that
my topic was controversial. Therefore, the topic of my article seemed
relevant to the Emacs community.

*** Conclusions

This small experiment showed that the direct visibility of my personal
web page is still very small, despite years of trying to provide good
content for some communities like Emacs or [[id:tags-pim][PIM]] where existing feedback
is very positive in general.

The issue I see is that whenever I'm not willing to promote my own
blog articles on centralized and widely used platforms like reddit,
almost no-one is able to find and read this content.

I've got some ideas that might be able to push my visibility even
further such as [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues/48][feeds per tags]]. In addition to that, we should also be
using more technologies that allow us to curate our own newsfeeds,
collecting feeds while stumbling over interesting blogs, instead of
sticking to centralized forums that will be gone some day. We could
publish and share our feeds so that peers are able to learn about
other feeds. You can follow my [[id:tags-decentralization][decentralization]] articles on more ideas
on that topic.