There’s been quite a lot of Notes lately of people sharing exact subscriber numbers and passing this off as proof of something.
Here’s a systems thinking spin on the meaning of numbers in open feedback loops.
Essentially, wherever you have a process that remains open in any fashion as to understanding any core factors of why the number is what it is…
you have an incomplete feedback loop.
It’s like The Office episode where the have the fun run for a cure. When Toby arrives first at the finish line, he asks Kelli why she did not design the route to end back at the office?
Now everyone has to figure out how to get back to the office to complete the loop.
Our races have closed feedback loops. Our trips end up back home. Our kids go to school and then come home. We go to the grocery store and back.
We don't go to the grocery store and then end up standing in the middle of a field with bags of groceries, looking around for any sign of “proof” of what to do next.
I don’t know why we expect closed feedback loops in the rest of our lives, but we let work forever keep the incomplete loops open. It’s like work as a system does not really want to be held accountable.
Thus, exact numbers in open feedback loops have little, if any meaning.
And what are readers supposed to do with these posts other than give a thumbs up or a canned celebratory reply? Does this move the platform forward?
Does this move you and your publication forward? If you think it does, can you explain exactly why the number is what it is?
Subscription metrics are inherently open feedback loops. Always have been, always will be unless we establish a new paradigm to deal with the inherent complexities around why someone subscribes to something. This was something we probably should’ve worked out when we started playing around with the subscription model…if we really wanted it to have more definitive meaning.
Now the subscription model is full of shortcuts, symptom mitigation, and misleading metrics. There’s an inertia to it now that would be impossible to steer in a more fruitful direction.
Even if we tried, it is unlikely that we could nail this down with any particular comprehensiveness to derive any real meaning from it.
It’s certainly much easier to look at the current number, see that it is higher, and grab that and post it as proof of something than it would be to dig more into exactly why people are subscribing and unsubscribing and writing around that.
But the latter thing would be the more important and potentially informative thing to do instead.
What do I suggest instead?
Substack gives you a little trend statement about each metric. If it’s green, that’s all you need to know. Maybe you want to try to make it more green…or keep it green?
If it’s grey or red (I thought I saw a red one at one point), you have to think about whether you want to dig into why that metric is not green and whether you want to try some experiments or not.
So, you look at your recent body of work and see if you can identify any gaps or changes you made that may have had unintended consequences. If you took a week off, then a grey or red statement makes sense.
I realized this approach just 2 weeks ago after observing so many notes about exact numbers (in an open loop process) and I went and looked at mine to see if there might be a better way.
I’m not here to tell you are “wrong” by posting exact numbers. It’s what the system promotes and rewards you for doing….why wouldn’t you do it?
But, it’s not a healthy, sustainable approach to be obsessed over exact numbers in a system and model that is inherently open-ended which makes exact numbers mostly meaningless.
I’m here to suggest how to break some habits born out of the very noisy, largely unconscious, and uncurious world of being online and on social media. There’s much about our implementation of tech that’s simply been about throwing the spaghetti against the wall…because we were told by the tech makers that’s how we innovate.
The very nature of sharing thoughts and ideas to a global audience when the paradigm and model for a new way forward were never addressed, just makes any metrics that much more fraught with errors, misguidance, or misunderstanding.
We should become a bit more skeptical about what it promotes for and rewards us for doing…because these metrics are really for the tech, not you.
An idea!
Post more about exactly what you will keep doing or the new thing you will try in order to improve a metric but don’t talk about the metric itself.
This will be the meatier stuff your readers can interact with.
Imagine the two scenarios as potential conversation starters in a face-to-face dialogue.
“Hey! Great to get together. What’s been going on with you?”
The subscriber number scenario…
“I recently achieved 100 subscribers on my Substack.”
The deeper conversation scenario…
“I’m exploring some new content (or a new approach) to my writing.”
Or, “I’ve been writing about X on Substack.”
Exact numbers are great for processes where we can pin down exactly how we arrived at that number and then we have something we can replicate.
Exact subscriber counts on social media are not that. At least, not yet.
Joe’s Jots is becoming Thinking in Public. One hot shower and a rush of thoughts about our general malaise around thinking makes it so!
In our prevailing systems, thinking is verboten. It’s seen as wasteful and not “action-oriented.”
It’s why we have ““over-thinking” treated almost as a psychological disorder but we never hear of the absolute scourge of under thinking on society and our personal lives.
Please subscribe if you like to think.