Going Viral Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Chasing numbers hasn’t ever paid off for me — but following my passion has.
I have been Very Online for a very long time, and that’s come with a fair share of social media “successes” and a boatload of failures.
In the 1990s, I was a popular user on AOL’s Antagonist Games Network. Though I was in elementary school at the time, I was given a dedicated spot in the platform’s weekly caption contest and had a handful of fans and imitators. In my teen years, I blogged on Myspace and Livejournal and developed a modest audience, though none of my writing there every really took off. In the early 2010’s, I became a power-user on Tumblr, helping run their curated #prose tag, and having a lot of my own writing featured.
Several memes I created on Tumblr went viral and spread widely off the platform during this period. One was a controversial meme ranking breakfast cereals, which nobody agreed with and everybody found outrageous, which garnered it a loud response. The other meme that got a lot of traction was about shifting my identity from bisexual to gay (and back again) — it offended both bisexual and gay people, because they mistook a description of my own personal experience as a prescription for how others ought to identify and feel. I also unwittingly ignited a lot of…
