O great and wise, to be ill at ease when your deeds please the mob!... Take no pleasure in the wonder of the mob, for ignorance never gets beyond wonder. While vulgar folly wonders wisdom watches for the trick.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The crowd's wonder was distrusted here centuries before anyone measured engagement, and the mechanism has not changed, only the counters. The crowd rewards the loud, the simple, and the instantly graspable; none of these correlates with the good. Translated honestly for a metric-soaked age: when your cheapest work gets the biggest response, treat it as information about the audience you are attracting, not as a verdict on quality. The approval worth optimising for belongs to the few people whose judgment you would trust against your own. Their tepid nod outweighs a stadium.
Practice
- Choose your jury: three to five people whose standards exceed yours. Their reaction is the score; the crowd's is the weather.
- Audit what your applause is training you to make. If reach keeps rewarding your shallowest output, you are being domesticated.
- Keep one piece of work in progress that the crowd will never see the point of. It keeps the standard alive.
Use this when
- Use this whenever numbers are rising and quality is not; that gap is the trap closing politely.
- Use it on praise from people who benefit from praising you; applause with an invoice attached is marketing.
Ignore this when
- Don't flip into despising the audience; popular and good overlap often enough (maxim 270 guards that flank).
- Don't use "the mob won't get it" as armour for work that is merely unclear. Sometimes the crowd is right and the trick is real.
A picture of it
The post took nine minutes: a borrowed quote, a sunset, a platitude. It outperformed everything he had written that year, and for a fortnight he made more of the same, watching the numbers climb and the emails from serious readers stop. The self-audit came at month's end: which hundred followers had arrived, and which three readers had gone silent. He deleted the template and wrote for the three. Slower graph, better room.
Play to the gallery and you will own the gallery. The people you wanted were never sitting there.