Another thing that I find disconcerting about Tumblr is the false sense of totality I get of the engagement from readers. On the blogspot platform, I had very little sense of who was reading or how. My sitemeter (which I installed probably in 2007 or 2008) is still a hotbed of incredibly fucked up search terms — so many that I honestly can’t even tell how many people read things and how many are looking for horrible, horrible things on the internet.

That meant that being linked to occasionally and length of comment threads were the total measure of success. I liked not being able to see if anyone “liked” the post, as though reading and furrowing your brow is somehow less useful than “liking” something (or, more accurately for many people, if they’re anything like me, bookmarking something).

Having now amassed maybe a thousand-plus “likes,” I realize how unlikely it is I’ll ever go through them. Which means I’ve developed a kind of rating system — which has as much to do with subject and whim as it does to quality of post — to “like” things. But then I see everyone who “likes” my stuff, probably for similarly obscure reasons, and that becomes a new barometer, one that makes me feel like even fewer people are reading or care.

In both cases the audience is still hypothetical. Lurking is the norm, maybe especially on Tumblr, where I can assume that if I post something, about 250 people will at least acknowledge its existence. Who knows if that was true in the Blogspot days. But knowing that number, 250 (or 1,000, or 10,000), so concretely still causes me to curb my enthusiasm. It acts as a ceiling instead of a floor.