I looked at my traffic this morning.
Thirteen people came to the site. Twelve of them came from Facebook.
That is not an audience. That is a loan.
I have been publishing every day for about a year and a half. Every post goes up on the site, and then I put a link on Facebook, and then I wait to see what happens.
Some days a couple hundred people read it. Some days almost nobody does. Same subject. Same length. Same care put into it.
I used to think I was doing something different on the good days. I would go back and study the ones that landed. Look at the title. Look at the first line. Look at when I posted it.
I never found the pattern. There isn’t one I can see. Some mornings the door is open and some mornings it isn’t, and nobody sends a notice either way.
For a long time I treated that as a puzzle to solve. Write a better hook. Try a different hour. Shorten the title.
It took me too long to understand that the puzzle was never the problem.
The problem is that a company I do not work for decides every morning whether my work gets seen.
Not because they are out to get me. I doubt anyone over there knows my site exists. It is just that a machine sorts what goes in front of people, and I do not get to read the rules, and the rules change.
I built the whole thing on rented ground.
Now here is the part where the honest version has to show up.
The advice everybody gives is: build an email list. Own your audience. Get out from under the algorithm.
That advice is correct. It is also nearly useless the way it is usually given, because it skips the hard part.
I know, because I already tried the shortcut.
I had a personal email list. About seventy people. Friends. Family. Folks I have known for years.
I sent them my work. Most of them never opened it. Some of them, I think, would rather I stopped.
That was not a distribution failure. That was me misunderstanding what a list is.
Those seventy people never asked for it. I put myself in their inbox because I had their address, not because they wanted the mail. An address book is not an audience. Nobody on it raised a hand.
A real list is only made of people who asked.
And here is the arithmetic nobody puts in the advice.
At thirteen visitors a day, with a signup form sitting where people can see it, I might pick up one person a week. Maybe.
Fifty people in a year. If I am lucky.
That is the honest number, and I am not going to dress it up.
So why bother.
Because of what those two numbers do over time.
The Facebook number does not compound. A good day does not make tomorrow better. Every morning starts back at zero and I ask again.
The list number only goes one direction. Fifty people this year are still fifty people next year, plus whoever comes after. Nobody can throttle them. There is no algorithm between me and an inbox. The person asked, and the mail arrives.
One of those is a slot machine. The other is a foundation.
I have spent a year and a half feeding the slot machine because it pays out faster.
Now the part that connects to everything else I write about here.
I spend my days arguing that AI systems should follow rules you can actually see. That a system which cannot show you why it did what it did is a system you cannot trust, no matter how well it performs.
And I built my own operation on top of a ranking system that will not tell me anything.
I cannot see why one post travels and another dies. I cannot appeal it. I cannot even confirm that anything happened. All I get is a number on a dashboard the next morning.
That is the exact thing I write against. I just did not notice it, because it was the plumbing and not the subject.
That is how these dependencies work. They do not feel like a decision. They feel like the way things are.
So here is where I have landed.
I am not quitting Facebook. Twelve out of thirteen is still twelve, and I am not too proud to take it.
But I am done treating it like a strategy. It is weather. You dress for it, you do not negotiate with it.
The thing I can actually build is small and slow and mine. One reader at a time, each one having asked.
A year from now I will either have that list, or I will be right here again, reading a dashboard and wondering what I did wrong.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
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