Notesing Into the Mist
š“āā ļø Linn's Desk | Three weeks of scheduled Notes, an interesting wobble, and zero conclusions yet. Just feelings and observations and the agreement to meet back here after Midsummer.
Iām on a Notesing spree at the moment. Have you noticed?
Hej Messmate!
I canāt resist a challenge and I love, love, love hexperimentation. Some may think thatās a results-driven mind at play, but the thing that really interests me about experiments and challenges is not the results.
Itās the bit before.
You know, when youāre doing the thing and noticing things and resisting the urge to decide what it all means before the stewās finished cooking.
Thatās where Iām at with the Notesing challenge right now.
Notesing, in case youāre wondering, is a verb describing the process of writing and posting (and scheduling) Substack Notes. Later on, I may expand the definition to cover the performance analysis too, but weāll cross that bridge when we get there.
So, hereās whatās cooking at the moment. Three weeks ago, I discovered the Notes scheduling function here on the stacks. Iāve promised myself so many times to get on with it and just post something every day, but I kid you not - my demand avoidance kicks in the moment I look at that empty little window trying to think of something interesting to say.
Scheduling changes the game for me, so I set myself a Notesing challenge. Write a weekās worth of Notes every Monday morning and schedule them to be released in four themed streams. Seven days and twenty-eight Notes. Every Monday.
The real challenge is to keep them going all the way to Midsummer and the rules are simple: show up, post with intention, donāt fiddle with it obsessively, and keep notes on the Notesing progress. Not because I have a grand strategy or even a course to sell you. Iām just knowsy. I want to know things, and that curiosity has always been a good enough reason for me to try (and fail) things in public.
Three weeks in, Iāve noticed a few things that may be random, or they may turn out to mean something. Weāll see about that, but hereās what Iāve noticed so far. In no particular order. And with zero weight attached to any of it yet.
The numbers moved.
Not dramatically or with any great conviction, but thereās been a wobble this week. New followers and subs are arriving. A few (14!) disappeared overnight and my guess is they either checked themselves out because Iām āspammingā their feed with my Notes, or they may not have noticed my AI stance before. They could also have been bots that were culled by Substack. Who knows?
Either way, numbers will fluctuate. This is especially true when you rock the boat on social media to change the way the algo treats you and your content. It isnāt a verdict, so Iām in no way discouraged. I am keeping an eye on it though, just in casesā¦
The sleepwalkers came out.
Old posts from months ago, sometimes longer, are suddenly getting likes. It happened before too, but sporadically. Not to a number of them each day.
I have two theories about this and neither of them is based on anything more tangible than instinct. Either the Notes are pulling people back through the archives, or the algorithm has noticed Iāve woken up to this side of the stacks and decided to give some of my older content a little push.
Both could be true. I could also be way off the mark. Maybe itās just a coincidence. Nothing to do with me. After all, weāre still in the vibes and observations stage here.
My feed has improved.
This one I wasnāt expecting but itās the observation I trust the most, because itās entirely within my own experience and therefore unambiguous.
The more Iāve been Notesing, the more Iāve been reading other peopleās Notes, and the more Iāve been engaging with the platform as a place rather than a publishing channel. The feed has become interesting in a way it genuinely wasnāt before. I look forward to opening it. Thatās not nothing.
I no longer get the celebrities Substack thinks I might be interested in flowing through my feed. The last few days it has been filled with interesting people posting interesting things about topics Iāve been Notesing. Slight echo chamber warning there, but still so refreshing. Iāve especially enjoyed all the posts addressing women in tech and neurodivergent women working with AI as their collab partners.
That, to me, is the interesting part for writers and creative people trying to use social platforms without being swallowed by them. Sometimes the first useful result is not growth, but a better room.
Three weeks is not enough time to draw any conclusions. What I can say is that Notesing into the mist, consistently, with no guarantee of whatās on the other side, does appear to produce something.
Whether that something compounds or plateaus or turns out to have been entirely coincidental? Well, I guess weāll have to save that discussion for the Midsummer post. We should have actual data by then.
For now, the hexperiment continues.
~Linn š“āā ļø
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