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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +layout: layouts/note.njk |
| 3 | +title: The Right Kind of Attention |
| 4 | +date: 2022-10-15T09:34:55-07:00 |
| 5 | +city: San Francisco |
| 6 | +country: California |
| 7 | +extract: I will ascend to Valhalla! |
| 8 | +--- |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +106,820 people visited my website last week. Two posts had been upvoted to the top of the orange website and a hellish amount of attention was suddenly thrown my way. |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | + |
| 13 | + |
| 14 | +This has happened before and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. The first time I got onto the front page of the orange website I was like _finally my time has come! I shall ascend to Valhalla! Mom, mom, take a look—my genius is about to be recognized!_ But what I didn’t understand back then as a writer desperate for eyeballs is that you need to be careful about all this and find the right kind of attention: optimizing for eye balls is almost always bad for you. And so the orange website always has been, and always will be, the wrong kind of attention for me. |
| 15 | + |
| 16 | +Most writers would kill for this many eyeballs though. _Look at all this engagement! I have never felt more engaged!_ But now, if I could go back and give my teenage self some advice, then I would shake them silly and shout about how they need to invest in smaller communities and ignore the likes and retweets and eyeballs as much as they can. |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +On a similar note, I genuinely admire how [Tom MacWright](https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news.html) feels the same way about this stuff. Except he takes it one step further by adding these lines of JavaScript to his website: |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +```javascript |
| 21 | +try { |
| 22 | + if (document.referrer) { |
| 23 | + const ref = new URL(document.referrer); |
| 24 | + if (ref.host === "news.ycombinator.com") { |
| 25 | + window.location.href = "https://google.com/"; |
| 26 | + } |
| 27 | + } |
| 28 | +} catch (e) {} |
| 29 | +``` |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +These humble lines of JavaScript will redirect folks away from your blog when they click a link on the orange website. Tom writes: |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +> Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web. |
| 34 | +> |
| 35 | +> Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now. |
| 36 | +
|
| 37 | +As I dove into the comments of the two posts that shot up last week, I started to think about what kind of audience this is and how I don’t want any of this; the passive aggressiveness, the snark. But, most important of all, I don’t want this kind of relationship with the people who read my work. |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +Because attention alone is not enough. |
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