Just One Click
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Human behaviour is fascinating. So is my ego. Then perhaps my ego is just a Mandelbrot of the human ego. In short, a Mandelbrot is infinite recursion. As you zoom in, the same patterns reoccur.
The duality of human behaviour is what is intriguing to me. By duality, I mean that human behaviour can appear so simplistic and, at the same time, equally complex.
My minimal data set for making these judgements is the tiny sample of people who read my LinkedIn articles.
I tell myself that I don’t care who reads my work. I do it for my benefit. Writing is a process that I use to “defrag my hard drive”. The process helps me complete my thoughts and better understand my thinking on topics that interest me.
Much of my writing never makes it into a Just in Time article. That is a good thing. Only the curated work that passes my very low-quality bar gets forced upon those who are downstream of my publish button.
Despite my disinterest in reader analytics, from time to time, I am tempted to see what subjects get the most attention. This is my ego. When I hit the target and write about something that excites people, my email inbox is a good analytics measure.
Generally, subjects that stir emotions get the highest response. In particular, if I go a little deeper on a topic that stirs my emotions. The most read article was about my dad and contained a picture of me sitting in a circle with my dad and some cows on a Transkei beach.
I recently adjusted how I publish my articles on LinkedIn. I started using the “Write Article” function on the home page instead of publishing a “Photo” of the article. The impact of this change is that one must click on the link to read the article. As a photo, one could read the article without clicking away from the feed. Just one click reduced readership by two-thirds. My ego is destroyed!
There is another possibility. Perhaps no one reads my articles even when published as a photo, and the LinkedIn analytics are all messed up. Nevertheless, false data might as well be real if the ego doesn’t know any better.
In typical Mandelbrot style, in future, I will publish the same article more than once. I will publish in different formats and see if LinkedIn analytics can provide any meaningful insights into human behaviour.
More importantly, I will discover if LinkedIn analytics can provide any meaningful insights into understanding my ego. Somehow, I doubt it.
Justin Spencer-Young
