I'd like your feedback [TE]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 29 seconds. Contains 297 words
This is a Trenchant Edges Survey.
My last post about The Matrix a couple weeks ago messed me up. I had 9 people cancel after I posted it. I didn’t even advertise it because that felt pretty fucking bad. 1 or 2 is fine. But damn, 9 people is a lot of people to tell you to fuck off in a day.
I drafted this post (and the other one in your inbox) a week ago and have been avoiding hitting send since.
Any feedback is welcome. Hearing nothing made it worse.
So, I’ve got to own that as an L.
It’s too fucking long. I did a poll a while back and it said to write as long as I want but I put that poll at the end of a 2000 word post so it’s probably a bad sample.
The title is shit. It’s not descriptive, I wrote it to be in line with a series I started last February which is too long ago for anyone to actually remember and right at the end I decided to be clever and reference an, uh, 44 year old muppet movie in the title which has nothing to do with the topic.
I did overwrite it and should have taken a day to strip it down. There was a lot to say but I probably could have cut 500-1000 words if I worked at it for a few hours.
OK, so worst case scenario here is I wrote a bad post and nobody liked it.
I think 1500-2500 words is the sweet spot between depth without overstaying my welcome most of the time.
Does that make sense?
I was going to put a poll here but I realized I don’t plan on writing less than that.
:-D
Anyway, thank y’all for reading.
I typically read a little, skim a little, read some more . . . but IIRC the Matrix one I actually read all the way through. No idea what was so offensive to 9 people, but I'm not a typical matrix fan. I'm only peripherally aware of the lore about politics and gender, etc but I appreciated that you acknowledged those but went deeper to more archetypal analysis, because it looks to me like that is where the symbols are pointing. Why would that arouse so much ire as to unsubscribe? I don't know, Matrix fans are funny, possibly only exceeded in their fanerdicalism by Trekkies.
I've been thinking about increasing my meagre contribution, but am currently, shall we say, between jobs, so it probably won't happen any time soon.
Do people unsubscribe over length? I would think they'd just skim/skip, which is what I do. You could probably tighten up most of your posts, but if I wanted high quality, dense reading that would make me work, I'd subscribe to academic journals and go to grad school. Sorry you lost so many people but I wonder how much of that isn't about anything you did or didn't do, maybe they're government workers who haven't had a paycheck in a month, or budgeting for the holidays, or whatever.
I read part of it and throughly enjoyed the part I did read, but I haven't seen the entire Matrix series (just the first two movies). I didn't finish reading it because it was so long, and I didn't have sufficient experience to properly contextualize the information.