I'm not one to downplay the significance of short-form content in today's world. For all that matters, younger generations may almost exclusively use short-form content, which would make me a dinosaur for not using it as much. And we know what happened with dinosaurs.
From the perspective of someone not posting much short-form content, it seems to me that both writing and consuming this kind of content is more facile, but it comes at a cost: it's also more addictive.
On such platforms (Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, perhaps Liketu), one or a few interactions a day is a drop in a bucket. You really need to be active and engaging throughout the day to stand out on people's feeds.
There are people who enjoy doing that. I'd say who are born for that, in some cases. For me, it would be a huge drain of energy.
Realizing that I can't keep up, I decided to only interact on Threads when I have something to say or ask. Sure, people who are on Threads and don't know me from elsewhere won't be impressed. I wouldn't be impressed either if I were an avid user of Threads and someone dropped a thread or a comment every once in a while.
Talking about every once in a while... that makes sense for blogging or podcasting or vlogging too. No matter how good you are, creating content every once in a while doesn't create expectations for the audience to see new content, and at some point will cause them to move on.
This is where I learned from short-form content and how things seem to work there.
On one end, publish posts often, in my case daily. With fresh content every day, the audience doesn't get bored and has always something new to read.
Engaging with people who comment is something very important, obviously. It's true that I don't receive hundreds of comments like others do, or this would become quite time-consuming.
On the other end, I rarely write posts above 1000 words, trying to keep them up to a few minutes of read time. Most people seem to prefer shorter posts and to the point.
One of the past days I celebrated one year of uninterrupted daily posting on Hive.
This is what HiveSQL says:
Last missed posting day: 367 days ago, on May 5th, 2022.
368 if we count today.
It wasn't easy. I posted:
- when I was sick (including these days)
- when nodes or interfaces acted up
- on holidays
- when I took a few days off
This was one of my goals, to reach at least 1 year of uninterrupted posting. Not part of my Hive goals this year, but I wanted to reach it nonetheless.
We'll see where the journey goes from here.