#getting noticed

Tags are your key to getting noticed on Tumblr. They help your content show up on tag pages, search results, explore page, and eventually someone’s dashboard. Users often use tags in posts to add more commentary, which is fun.

But remember that you won't ever generate in search or explore.

To get the most out of your tags, be sure to tag from general to specific. If you’re posting an anime screengrab, it’s not enough to tag it #anime. You’d be competing with thousands of other posts. You should also tag the show title, art style, time period, etc.

Monkey fairness is the programming in the old parts of our brains that cause us to lose our minds when we think there is inequity. It happens to gorillas, it happens to chimps, and of course, monkeys. You can see it with Capuchins in this video.

If you don't want to watch (though it is very entertaining), the gist is that 2 monkeys display fairness expectations. When they perform the same task and get cucumbers, both are happy monkeys. They do the task again and one gets a cucumber and the other gets a grape. The monkey with the cucumber loses his shit and throws his perfectly good cucumber away in anger.

This is what is really happening to us when we feel bad about our numbers.

We’re not really upset no one has seen our work. People post things for tiny fandoms and are perfectly happy only 10 people has seen them. We’re upset because we think our work in on par with someone else’s (I mean we certainly spent enough time) but our numbers aren’t as high as theirs.

That’s not pleasant to think about or admit to, but it’s true. 

And it leads us down a dark path of thinking--why does everyone have more than me? why am I so unpopular? Everyone has a ton of followers and I don’t! Do I suck? When we get 100 notes, we wonder why we didn’t get 500. When we get 500, we wonder why we didn’t get 1000.

This sketch got 2000 notes in 3 days--how many followers did I have at the time? 34. There was some zeitgeist I accidentally caught. The drawing I posted right afterwards still only has 50 notes. The reality is none of it makes any sense.

It’s like the fairness experiment, the value of our work has nothing to do with the numbers. The cucumber or grape is arbitrary, these feed algorithms are just randomly pushing our buttons. But we’re not monkeys in an experiment, and we don’t need to do this to ourselves.