Platform rules

 I have just had a major realisation.

If you want your posts to reach more people:

Things that don’t matter:

Content

Presentation

Time of Posting

Length of post

Use of hashtags

 

Things that do matter:

The pleasure of the platform algo.

 

The posts that went viral were suggested by the platform to readers.

The posts that were ignored were NOT suggested by the platform to readers.

 

That’s it. That’s the epiphany.

******* 

What this means in plainspeak is that since we took our conversations and connections online, we created a layer that can control us - that platform. 

If you are on the old blogger platform, you will see a list of blogs you follow and their posts list, in reverse chronological order. Thats it. There is no filtering, no selection, no recommended posts. I am grateful for that bcs blogger is an old interface and no one wants to touch it at Google. (Thank God!) 

But there isn't a single other platform that brings the same honesty to the table. All other platforms - Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc., create an opaque, dense layer of control that determines whose posts we will see and whose we will not. This algo also controls which ads we will be subjected to, and how many.