That's My Bix!

I have an unfortunate relationship with social media.

I can see the idiocy in this entire statement by the way, given that blogs are essentially a focused form of one way social media. But also, I am reminded of the adage that if a service is free, then you are the thing being sold, and that is absolutely true in terms of social media. Trust me, you would not BELIEVE the things you voluntarily give to people who are trying to sell you things or ideas.

For some time, I was doing a daily thread on Facebook that I called #bixquestions which was a discussion-based social thread. It started when I asked everyone which word they always mispronounced until they heard it spoken (or still mispronounce), and then grew from there. I kept it going for a few years — I had started it up seriously right after the 2016 election because it felt like people needed a focalizing point of community, to feel less alone. I had given serious thought to starting this blog back up at that time, but I didn’t want the trauma of the election to be about my own pain or to be self-promotional in any way. I wanted to do good and to make people feel good. Ultimately, I think it did that but also, inadvertently, it did so by strengthening the reliance on the tool I was using — Facebook.

The #bixquestions threads were long and legendary. Some of them had upwards of 300 and 400 responses, and one had over 800. Many of them made me laugh out loud and sometimes the answers brought me close to tears.

I kind of stopped posting the questions when others started filling that gap with their own traditions and questions. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy asking #bixquestions — I did! But sometimes it made me feel creepy — like maybe focusing off myself and into the community and building a community was having some detrimental side effects too. For instance, by frequently posting questions that had big reactions, I slowly began to realize that it messed with the Facebook algorithm so that my non-question posts were showing up in more streams. Basically I was accidentally doing exactly the thing I was trying not to do.

So now I feel a bit conflicted about the entire affair.

I am still on Twitter, although I moved mostly off my That’s My Bix twitter persona and primarily use @wendywimmer since I’m now doing the annoying thing of “building a brand” there without a pseudonym. And I have an author page on Facebook that I maintain for the same reason, although I really only update it through Instagram, which I also converted off my pseudonym to wendy_wimmer. And the annoying thing is that all of this is necessary because publishing is in fact a business, so publishers assume that if you have 1000 people following you that you can convince 250 of them to buy your book, but if you have 4000 people following you, then you’ll definitely sell 1000 books, and all of that impacts how likely they are to bid on your book. After all, what is writing a book for if not to draw as large an audience as possible.

Sometimes I wish I had a time machine and could go back to really capitalize and operationalize my long ago popularity into something larger, but eh, if we had a time machine, I’d probably use it for better stuff than that. Like somehow making sure that Jeb Bush got the Republican nomination in 2016.

Now wouldn’t THAT be something to change the sands through the hourglass?

#Bixquestions: Have you ever been challenged by someone who didn’t realize you were an expert at the subject in question? How did you resolve it? (Inspired by someone asking Stephen King if he had even read The Stand)