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.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

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 heated discourse on Tumblr about a whether it was problematic for a lesbian to be attracted to male comedian and musician Neil Cicierega.

One of my most widely-shared Tumblr memes, a ranking list for breakfast cereals. This meme got shared a lot because everyone disagreed with it and felt the need to chime in.

From these experiences, I observed that the best way to get a lot of attention online is to provoke strong emotions, particularly intense disagreement or outrage. If people can’t help but loudly, vociferously respond to your take, you’re going to get a lot of responses. That type of attention tends to be useless at best, and downright terrifying at worst, though. I never even got any free cereal out of the ordeal.

When Tumblr began to die, I moved to Medium, where my essays about trigger warnings, net neutrality, and the Aziz Ansari accusations generated pretty intense reactions. In each of those essays, I wrote candidly about current…