I'm "Awful" at Social Media

The weird story of my recent viral Linkedin post

So I went somewhat viral on Linkedin this week. I didn’t really know that was a “thing” until recently and as I watch it unfold it’s been a bit of a shock. I've want to reflect a bit on that process and what it all says here.

I’m gonna start this story with a pretty irrefutable fact - I’m awful at social media. Even writing that statement bothers me a bit, because is based in a few assumptions. Firstly, that it’s possible to be “good” at social media and secondly that when I say “I’m not,” you all know what I mean.

We live in a super weird time of influencers and viral content and some years ago I basically looked at all that and said “no thanks.” I got on facebook back in the day when it was friends commenting on photos of recent vacations and I kinda checked out when it began the slide into the hellscape that it more or less is now. None of this is to say I’m not “on” social media, I am every day - like most people. My drug of choice was Twitter and when that went really south, Bluesky. I mostly kinda “lurk” and follow people posting about topics I find interesting - mostly the war in Ukraine, and lately the various catastrophes in American politics. 240 character posts are not really for me though, as anyone who is accustomed to my 3000 word Moldova Matters articles would understand.

A few years back I realized I needed to be more proactive. I’ve never really figured out a way to let people interested in news about Moldova know about my Substack, so I thought I should post a bit. To say that this has been halfhearted is an understatement. I have around 360 followers on X, 110 on Bluesky, 28 on Threads and around 1000 on the Moldova Matters facebook page¹. I don’t interact with other users much and just kinda post links to the articles I write on each platform and then forget about it.

Linkedin is a bit of a new frontier for me here. A friend of mine told me last year that I should really be more active there because Linkedin had morphed into a really vibrant social network. I saw the appeal pretty quickly - some level of real ID, professional setting and a generally kinda collegial atmosphere. Taken together, it seemed like a much less toxic place. I also found that people who were professionally interested in Moldova would find my posts and engage with me. Over time I’ve gotten a steady stream of connection requests from academics, journalists, diplomats, development professionals and others. It’s formed a nice little professional community focused on Moldova.

Then yesterday, I got a connection request from this man.

The flame emojis caught my attention pretty quickly (which is probably what he intended). I looked up Mr. Rhodes and he’s a kinda fringe right-wing dude who ran for president in the US (apparently). Basically, this isn’t the usual connection request for me and when I dug in a bit I found that he liked a single post of mine.

Unbeknownst to me a low key comment war had been raging under this post since I made it back on April 3rd. That comment war went supernova sometime on April 9th and 10th.

At the time of writing this there are over 180 comments and they keep coming in. It’s reached 11,000+ Linkedin members and you can see the impressions above. This is by far the most viral thing I’ve ever posted on social media - and it’s totally among strangers.

I won’t go too deep into the comments themselves - if you’re interested you can scroll through the unfolding madness yourself. Suffice to say it’s a free-for-all about who is stupider - Donald Trump, the people who support him, the people who oppose him, economists, your fucking face, etc. Moldova catches quite a few stray bullets in this brawl as people occasionally nod to the original post with thoughts like this:

Or…

Or my personal favorite:

Someone from the reality based community helpfully tells Marty that I do live in Moldova, and have for some time, which elicited a response from Marty telling the other guy that he should go to Moldova himself. Ha! great retort!

The closest that people on the Trump side come to engaging with my original post is long winded “he’s playing chess not checkers” kinda diatribes. The anti-Trump side has a lot to say about penguins². Let’s just say that this isn’t a highly intellectual debate - from any side. That’s not to say “both sides have a point” or “everyone is equally bad,” but it is to say that the whole conversation is very tedious (if occasionally funny). Here’s one I particularly liked:

As funny as that was to me, it was also a little concerning. “Everything I read” clearly indicated that he had not read the article he is commenting on at all. This prompted me to dig into my Substack analytics a bit to see what all this attention was yielding me.

The answer? Nothing.

With the 11,000+ people who saw the post, 17,000 impressions and wildly insane comment war, only around 80 people clicked through to the article itself. I guess 80 new readers isn’t *bad* but given that the post only led to 2 new signups to the free subscription tier I suspect they weren’t new at all. Most likely some of those lovely people I have been engaging with for the last year just saw my post on Linkedin before they checked their email and followed the link.

Apparently the hoards of midwestern small business owners and Canadian Trump supporters (?!?) weren’t really in the market for 3000 word articles about Moldovan affairs. Go figure.

What is the Lesson Here?

“It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.” - Macbeth

As I lay in bed last night running through the weirdness of this whole situation Macbeth’s words came to me and made me smile. At some point I realized that the algorithm that drove all of this madness pulled people in at various points far removed from the original post. Trump lover “Steve” posts the 98th comment saying “argh!! 4d-chess!! do your own research!!” and Bob, Steve’s friend / work colleague / whatever was shown “look what Steve just said!” This led Bob to write “Trump is an idiot!!” and post a picture of him next to Jeffery Epstein, etc. Neither of them probably ever saw or noticed the original post. The whole thing took on a life of its own.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m probably just doing social media wrong. I know that if I was one of those people who posted every time some big news happened with BREAKING: in all caps I could probably gather a bigger following. At some point I just decided that this wouldn’t fit my lifestyle. I don’t want to take time out of a dinner with family or friends to "be first” in sharing some bit of information. Until now I’ve always thought that this was a bit of a tough trade off - that I was not doing everything I could to promote my work by deciding that I wouldn’t live inside these platforms. Now I wonder if it really matters at all.

I’m gonna keep posting links to my articles of course. Now that I know there’s a chance this might happen I might even enjoy that tedious task more - this has been truly entertaining. But I really don’t think it actually helps much. So if you like what I write, either here in this vaguely random essay space of Fools & Foreigners, or at Moldova Matters please share with your friends! A nice email or message to someone you think might be interested usually works best. But you can also post on your social and see if you can generate a flame war using only a 3000 word essay about Moldovan justice reform as fuel. I mean, that’s a fun challenge right?

1. I’m also on Instagram but I’m so ignorant of that platform I don’t even know if people follow me there.

2. The penguins bit has been a popular retort for some time with very good reason. But what really surprised me was the number of MAGA people defending tariffing the penguins. Their “logic” was that somehow China would start routing goods via the penguin island to get around other tariffs. There are so many issues with this that there isn’t even sense starting with it. I do kinda like the image of a bunch of penguins setting up a port and customs office though. Little penguin customs officers with little stamps - this is the kinda thing that AI image generation was made for.