I Need To Be Liked: Interpersonally Second, Digitally First
From a sprawling AIM friends list, to an arbitrary player ranking in an online virtual world game, to a view count on your budding TikTok page about travel tips, online presence has always been represented by numbers. We’ve seen it at every point in our collective adolescence. It is concise and impossible to misread. There is a difference between a good measurement of success and a measurement that satisfies us. That number, in every shape it takes, does more than satisfy.
I remember being twelve, the first of many of my peers with an Instagram account. (If you have any association with the company, that is hypothetical. I was hypothetically twelve. I would never hypothetically break an app’s Terms of Service by signing up under the age requirement.) Back in 2014, when a user would like your post, their name would pop up over the caption. Liked by taylortot_02, sofiamarieeeee, and megs_eggs_, or something like that. Once that number hit double digits, it would stop populating the names and instead simply say, “11 likes”. My friends and I would often like our own posts in order to bump that number up past the threshold of those names being listed. Something as simple as a list of usernames was determined a status symbol. It looks better visually, yes, but it also makes you look better. More well-liked. More appealing.
Doesn’t End, Just Changes Shape
Jump forward five years, and I go through a horrendously embarrassing phase of wanting a TikTok following. I would get so annoyed that, when someone did something effortless and I put in effort, they received positive feedback and I didn’t. My frustration made me egotistical. I am swimming in the debt I owe to my high school friends for seeing past that. Even if I wasn’t lucky with social media algorithms, I sure fucking was when it came to the people who continue to love me to this day. Thanks, guys.
“I want TikTok clout so bad,” I’d bemoan to them, half-joking. “I do so many cool things. I can DJ. I write poetry. I can spin a bo staff around. I can edit videos in Adobe After Effects. I like to share music with people. Why doesn’t anyone want that?”
Thank God that none of us ever have to be 17 years old again. Once is enough.
But now, after almost four years, I can look at it with nuance instead of Oh My God I Should Have Been Shot For Being So Annoying. At the end of the day, I didn’t care about me — I cared about my work. I wanted creative connection from people who genuinely cared. I wanted someone to take interest in topics I had knowledge on. I wanted to be praised for Doing Something Cool, like a kid begging someone at the family gathering to watch how fast her cartwheel is — and all for a single, wow. Good job, kiddo.
There is something so especially violent about the social media machine for creatives, too; we are what we make, and if what we make is not loved, then it is dangerously easy to assume that neither are we. The severity now is even worse than it was only four years ago, when I learned this (and on a very small scale, with no major repercussions, and with no existing online following). Near the end of 2019, I threw together a video edit with a popular subject and a trending audio. I posted it. It got 300 likes, more than I’d ever gotten before. And I felt like shit. Even if it was so small and so insignificant in the larger scheme of my life, I got exactly what I wanted by making something I didn’t like.
I removed TikTok from my phone for about four months and came back with fresh eyes. My life was consumed by the Internet and the pandemic shortly thereafter. If the latter was beyond me, then at least the former was something I could control — both in the sense of what I make and what I see. If we do not curate our experience on social media to be enriching, then what are we doing? Being open-minded can coexist with knowing that you literally do not have to have to invest in all the small details of a social group or a movie franchise. Of course, there’s nuance, but if someone’s tireless self-promo keeps showing up in your feed and you don’t like it, block them. If you think the style of someone’s art is ugly, block them. If you think someone has shitty opinions on your favorite TV show, block them. These people are strangers to you — forever! And this is not a personal attack on their character. Removing things (tastefully) from your experience online is better for you in the long run than letting things you don’t like bring you down.
How Niche Is Too Niche
I got the positive feedback I wanted eventually, but on my terms. For about a year and a half, I posted edits* on TikTok, with my initial wind of traction being earned by edits of The Bad Batch (2021) as the debut season of the show was airing. Star Wars makes up over 50% of the media I’ve made edits of. As a result of Simply Doing What I Liked, I met some lovely people online, improved my skills, and briefly shared some principles and theory of video editing. I exclusively opened After Effects when I felt like it, never forcing myself to crank something shitty out in order to stay in the algorithm’s favor. If I busted my ass for a 30-second Star Wars: The Clone Wars edit and it got 50 likes, then that was more than fine. There are bigger things to life than how well-favored you are online.
There were always two options: make art with my favorite songs/shows/styles and lose out on likes, or capitalize on what was popular to earn more likes. In a video essay I did for an online showcase in 2021, I mention that editing is a love letter to all the things that bring me joy. It combines music, typography, motion graphics, and movies/shows that I love into one unique, artfully assembled video. It breathes new life into works of art we already love. Even if I’ve sort-of retired from consistent video editing, it is a hobby that changed the direction of my life. It led me to a career in graphic design.
In the middle of writing this piece, a friend tagged me in a Twitter thread: a small producer I was following had found my work after searching their name on YouTube. It happened to be the single edit I consider my favorite — not my best, but without-a-doubt my favorite thing that I’ve ever made as a video editor. This is why I do it. So that some niche, doing-what-they-love-unapologetically producer can see that someone loved their work so much they decided to do something about it. This is why I will always chose love over likes.
The best part about making edits is that, on a grand scale, it means very little. There is no industry for it — unlike the ways that bedroom songwriters become headlining musicians, or one’s lifetime of drawing becomes their career as a Disney sketch artist. People get social media and film industry jobs, yes, but nobody gets a salary job specifically making those thirsty edits of The Mandalorian with his helmet off. It is a niche purely of hobbyists, purely of people who are passionate about what they make. And if their skills lend well to a career, it’s simply an added bonus.
Fifty Is Still A Lot Of People, I Promise
I know that our mental scales have tipped when it comes to social media, especially with how TikTok’s structure incentivizes quick follows over sustained viewership. The list of human beings (or otherwise, for that matter) who achieve a million followers is miles long, but I think having that initial realization of “I don’t need clout to feel fulfilled in my work” helped my sense of scale to not be so warped by that. The highest follower count I had at one point was just shy of 8,500, but my consistent audience (as in, people I would regularly see leaving likes or comments) was somewhere closer to 100. Eighty-five hundred or one hundred, that’s a lot of fucking people. Those are crowds of people who take interest in my work. Like I said, wanting creative connection is great, but only as long as that connection is on your terms. No “posting so the algorithm doesn’t stop sharing your videos”, no capitalizing on trending content if you aren’t genuinely interested in it, and no creating only what people want. We exist to enrich our own lives as well as others’ — not to serve strangers on the Internet. Ritualistic behaviors for how we present ourselves on social media can become obsessions.
I don’t know what my life on the Internet looks like, moving forward. Sometimes I compare myself to my friends with more reserved online presences and feel that I could stand to quiet down a little more. Sometimes I observe my friends with bigger followings and communities, wishing I had a platform like that. I still find myself lacking pride in my digitally-centered hobbies in general, no matter how much I try to believe that I’m not afraid of being labeled “cringe”. I am! I am so afraid of bringing up something that other people think is lame! And it is sometimes so difficult to remember that worrying means you care. Almost every child has heard it from someone worth confiding in. It is a good thing to care. It is human to care.
Of course I care about being liked; that, too, is human. But there is no concise, infallible number that comes with Not Giving A Fuck. There is only me, my Star Wars edits, my bad drawings, and some of the happiest years of my life to date. I find that to be quite enough.