Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible.