How to Get Lots of Internet Points
If you use clickbait headlines like the one I used for this blog post, you might get a lot of Internet points. You might also get a lot of mockery and derision and not much respect. Where ever I go on the social web, I have to ask myself what my purpose is. There are ways of manipulating lots of different platforms so that the clicker next to your user name goes up. One of the buzz words that gets tossed around on different platforms is engagement. It is usually a quantitative term having to do with the number of likes or followers your "content" has. Content is also a buzzword and one I don't like very much. I'm not a content creator. I am a writer. I do the same thing millions of people have done before me. I think up things in my head. I assign words to those things and I record them. My purpose is to share ideas with other people in hopes that I can entertain, inspire, inform, enrage, persuade or interact with Internet strangers.
I had a normal Facebook account until 2017 when I had a post go viral and get tens of thousands of likes and many, many replies. It changed the way that I used the platform. Whereas before it was a collection of people I knew in real life, due to my acceptance of friend requests from strangers, it became a way to meet people from around the world who may or may not share my values. It also attracted a lot of trolls and drove me off social media for a long period. I can share just about anything on Facebook and get hundreds of Internet points but lots of them are meaningless because they are just empty clicks from people with whom I have no relationship. Also, Facebook is evil. Just a reminder.
On Reddit, I have an 18-year old account and 56,623 Karma, the Reddit name for Internet points. I have written hundreds of detailed and hopefully helpful posts over the years in technical subreddits but my two biggest Karma collectors are reposts from other social media platforms. One of them is a picture of a smiling dog. It is possible to accumulate hundreds of thousands of Karma on Reddit through reposting other people's content in a determined and continuous manner. This, however, makes you a bad person whose reason for existence is questionable. Don't do it. It's called Karma farming and it clogs up a pretty useful platform with crappy memes we have all seen before. Lots of people repost cool stuff from time to time, but making that the sum of your online presence is pretty contemptible and smacks of character flaws.
I have analytics on my blogs and I look at the numbers often, but I don't spend any time trying to manipulate them. My technique for getting Internet points through blogging is to try my best to be interesting and prolific. I want to meet real people and have real conversations. I like it when I write something that is measurably popular because it increases the chances of those things happening. I also take pride in writing what I hope are helpful technical articles with the hope of helping someone find a useful tool or technique that makes their work easier.
I follow the IndyWeb tenet of POSSE - Post on (your) Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, and it works for me. The only social media site I spend any meaningful time on is Mastodon. I have listed my blogs on a few blog directories and I help my friend Jedda maintain one as well. I don't do any kind of search engine optimization to drive traffic to my blogs.
To sum up, here's how to get Internet Points.
- Write good stuff
- Write lots of it
- Cross post
- Register on web directories
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