Unintentional virality and the paradox of connection

Two years of newsletters later, everything is still liminal.

Back in the late 90s, in the days when it was first gathering traction, blogging offered a platform for people like me: introverted individuals who, for some inexplicable reason, decided they wanted to publish their thoughts rather than journal in private for their own self reflection. It’s a paradox. Why attract attention on the internet when attention is the last thing I want in real life?

I’ve been asking myself some version of this question for the last 25 years. Each one of my blogs began as tentative experiments born out of curiosity just because I happened to land on the earlier side of tech and media adoption. But some grew into internal monologues of self expression and self preservation that allowed my true self to become visible. While I dabbled on LiveJournal, it wasn’t until I started a webzine on Asian American culture in 2000 that I started writing for an audience.

I painstakingly hand coded every single page of that website. Talk about a labor of love. Back then, anyone with an interest and a motivation to learn html was building personal websites. It seems so mundane now, but if you weren’t old enough to experience the nascent days of the internet, then reach back into the far corners of your memory and try remembering how it feels to blow open a door to something extraordinary—in this case, a gateway to the entire world on the other side of a garbled, high pitched dial up connection. The world wide web was truly magic and also a wonderful, unbridled mess like anything new often is.

I had no idea how many people, if any, were reading my webzine. We didn’t have the tools to know such things back then. But I do remember the first time I received an email from a reader outside my circle of friends. It was a signal, a spark, a connection to a real human felt through ethernet cables. Communities have always coalesced around shared interests and experiences. They emerge as a means of survival. These sparks can also flame unwanted interferences like self doubt and everything that leeches onto it: fear of judgment, misinterpretation, overexposure. Words are no longer my own once published.

Unintentional virality

A few weeks ago, I linked to my post-election newsletter on Bluesky and it went viral. I didn’t know until much later when I opened the app and was shocked to see it had garnered a few thousand likes. But it didn’t stop there. The notifications kept lighting up fast and furious, which led to a huge influx of new subscribers here (hi! 👋).

It was only my second post on Bluesky.¹ I kind of cringe at it now because look—the last sentence doesn’t even make grammatical sense. It was hastily written because I thought nothing of it when I posted to 70 followers. I gained 10,000 more in 24 hours.

I got freaked out and considered deactivating the account. Quite suddenly, overnight, I had a platform of followers who I didn’t know anything about. What did they expect to see from this one post? When you subscribe to a newsletter, what do you expect to read from just one essay? Impressions are powerful and they aren’t always in our control.

The notion of followers is an uncomfortable construct. That’s where the paradox comes back in. An introvert who does not like attention, does not want to be misunderstood, does not want to invite judgement, be pigeon-holed from someone else's interpretation of their work, be called pretentious, a fake, and all the countless misogynistic and racist things that I’ve been called in the past. The paradox of connections also tends to amplify disconnection and loneliness.

A friend of mine once challenged me with the question of why I was writing and who I was writing for. It was during a time when my last blog had reached peak traffic. It was a valid question. Still is. He suggested (too pointedly for my liking) that I was getting a little too drunk on what he perceived as my blogging “success.” He implied that maybe I was even addicted to the validation of strangers. Ouch.

But ok. I still think about that conversation. It remains a gut check as I continue to write for an audience of faceless readers. But we’re all friends here, right? Or what? Parasocial relationships can be weird. I still don’t know how to navigate around it when lines have been crossed. Well, what do you expect when you put everything out there? My inner voice mirrors my friend’s probing.

Why writing still matters

Creative callings persist despite all of that. Exactly two years ago, I launched this newsletter. I was sitting on the edge of uncertainty with a job that was about to end and the last two years rife with change: the closing of a food business with my spouse, a tumultuous death of a parent, extreme career burnout, and my oldest leaving for college.

Collectively, we were all coming out of Covid-era trauma. Personally, I had lived through the worst years of my life. I relied on this newsletter to process it all and act as an anchor, a weekly routine I can tether myself to so that I didn’t float away when my job ended. Unexpectedly, it has evolved into a small source of income.² Monetization was not the goal here initially, and I’m nowhere close enough to say that writing is my livelihood, but it’s enough to pay a few monthly bills. Maybe it’s false security, but in a time when everything feels so up in the air, this has meaning. Two years later, it is still my anchor.

Over the years, I’ve been told that my writing is authentic, that I’m brave because I’m vulnerable. I don’t know. I suspect all introspective writing is authentic and vulnerable. Anyone who shows up to a blank page is brave. I write about the things that I know, the things that I want to learn, the things that ring true because I’ve lived through experiences. And I’ve only lived through experiences because I’ve lived long enough to collect them.

I write because I live in a world that doesn’t always make sense, a world that isn’t always kind or inclusive to people like me or people like you. Those who also feel lost, afraid, adrift, othered, and grasping at optimism and joy to keep their heads above water. I write because just when I think the diversity of our voices are louder than when I first started blogging 25 years ago, I go to industry events, look around at the faces, and see that they are not. This is why it still matters. They’ll attempt to drown us with their cries when they dismantle DEI efforts because they claim it’s unfair and unjust. But unfair to whom?

I am just one in a billion voices, a nobody, a human. I have no idea why anyone follows me or listens to what I have to say. Sometimes the attention feels paralyzing, but then there is this: a singular reply to a singular post that was written haphazardly in haste. One reply that is a signal, a spark, a connection, from one human to another.

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What I read this week

• Links.net – The first ever blogger is generally considered to be Justin Hall, an undergrad student (coincidentally, from the college where my kid is at) who created a site called links.net in January 1994. The first web page was an aggregate of interesting links he found around the web. The original homepage looked like this.

• 6 hours under martial law in Seoul (The Verge) The big news story yesterday was South Korean President declaring martial law as a last ditch effort to save himself from impeachment and scandal. And South Koreans shut that down in a matter of hours. Sarah Jeong is a Korean American features editor at The Verge who happened to be in Seoul when martial law was declared. She is a journalist who does not cover Korean politics. She was also drunk at the time. But her on-the-ground reporting on Bluesky was one of the few real-time dispatches that we got in a fast moving, chaotic scene.

• South Korea Is Fighting for Democracy Again—And the World Needs to Know – Heesoo Jang, an Assistant Professor of Media Law and Ethics at UMass Amherst, shared a working op-ed pitch on Bluesky yesterday in light of unfolding events. Many people were asking, “how did this happen?” To understand how events escalated to this point is to understand the global context of South Korean politics. “South Korea’s struggle is a powerful reminder that democracy is not self-sustaining—it requires active vigilance.” Take note, America.

• We need raw awe (Aeon) In this tech-vexed age, our life on screens prevents us from experiencing the mysteries and transformative wonder of life.

• Changes (The Rumpus) Amanda Dibando Awanjo’s illustrated story about the loss of her father amid fall’s seasonal changes. It’s that time of year for me too, which probably explains why I feel so goddamn melancholy lately.

• Formaldehyde Cancer Risk in Your Neighborhood (ProPublica) In most of the country, formaldehyde contributes more to outdoor cancer risk than any other toxic air pollutant. Look up your address to see risks from the chemical on your block and where it comes from.
  Well, that’s no good.

• In New York, an Artist Employment Program Funded 300 Artists to Work with Local Community Organizations (Urban Institute) “For two years, each artist received a $65,000 yearly salary, health care, and other benefits.”
  I had heard about this program a few years ago. It was in response to the large percentage of arts organizations that were impacted from pandemic shutdowns, so I was interested to find this follow-up.

1. Did I say I was quitting all social media? I made it all year on one platform (Threads), but Zuck being Zuck and Trump being Trump, I decided if I was going to survive this presidency, I needed a non-billionaire backed platform to get my news. And just like that, I’m sucked back in.

2. I have calculated, based on the generosity of paid subscribers, that I am now earning around $7.50 an hour part time from this newsletter. This is double my wages from a year ago. It’s also slightly more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 in 16 states. I’m really moving up in the world!