It’s Quiet When I Hit Send
The two loudest things in my house.
I’ve often tried to describe what it’s like to be a writer with my online social media readership. I always fall short in my explanation, and I’ve asked GPT-4o to explain it to me at times because I don’t understand any of it.
I’m sitting here at Moose Lodge with my laptop on my lap, dog at my feet. I can hear the faint distant sound of the refrigerator and separate freezer humming. The loudest thing in this house is the sound of my tapping keys on my laptop.
I live in what’s called an ICF house. It stands for “Insulated Concrete Form,” and little sound gets through these walls. For you nerds, the dB level (noise) is so low it doesn’t register on my Apple Watch. It doesn’t go any lower than 30. To put that in perspective, typing on my laptop shows 37 dB.
I look at the long list of questions submitted on Quora and pick one to answer. I had 40 draft answers, and I deleted 19 that were now old and out of date. I’m determined to answer the other 19. I’ll sit for a minute, think about what I want to write, and start writing. Once I’ve made two passes, I’ll copy and paste my draft into GPT-4o to correct any punctuation, grammar, and spelling. Then I copy that back and overwrite my original, read it one more time, add relevant photos if I can (because people love pictures with stories), and hit send. Nothing happens. I’m back to something less than 30 dB. I’m then on to the next question.
It’s still quiet. Nothing happens. Depending on the time of day, I go to bed or get up and do something productive. There is no applause after I hit send, no immediate feedback except in rare cases, and I either answer another question if I have time or go on with my day. I’m completely unaware of who’s reading or from where in the world.
If I go to my stats page, it shows views. I have no idea why some get more than others. A picture helps, any picture will do, but I’m not writing to chase views. I’m writing to express an idea.
Sometimes years go by and I never get many comments or views. Recently, something I wrote almost seven years ago received a comment. I had to go back and read what I wrote, and of course, I’m horrified by my writing back then. That’s all I see. I’m surprised someone found it in the first place.
Recently, I’ve started to receive long messages from readers who tell me they have been reading my work for years. I straighten up and see if something is on my shirt. They write to me like they’ve known me for years when I’ve never heard of them before online. They tell me stories about their lives or how something I wrote impacted their world, and I’m stunned when I hear it. I feel like I did nothing, yet to them, it’s something and enough that they remember me. Some letters are very personal, but they write like they are talking to an old friend. I always try to write back.
I don’t think it sank in that any of my writings were having an impact out there until recently. The silence after I’m done writing reinforces just the opposite. I just see the lousy writer in me who does this to improve without thinking past the walls of Moose Lodge outside of the one who posted the question in the first place. It’s made me aware that I have to be a lot more careful about what I write.
I’ve been tracking my appearances on the Quora Digest since I started on Quora. From the first day I saw that I was on the digest and that Quora didn’t have the number in its stats, I created a spreadsheet and noted the date, the number of times I was sent out, and my running average and total. As I write this, I’ve been sent out 746 times. It went to a total of 147,953,000 recipients over the past seven years. If you count just 2024 alone, it’s over 41 million already. I did the math and it all worked out to about 11,000 people either on Quora or on the Digest every hour, around the world, 24-7. It’s about three a second. Still silence on this end.
After a while, the comments start to come in. Some days it takes more than two hours to get through them all. Then there are so many others where it’s very few. Quora doesn’t tell you every time you get a comment. It tells you a few, but then you’re on your own. This makes it all a bigger mystery.
If Quora didn’t give me the data, I’d have no idea at all. Yet even now, it’s still, “Tom who?” and I don’t mind. I’ll keep answering questions on Quora because I’m there for the love of writing.