I have a habit. I have no idea how common this is, or if anybody else does it at all. Well that last one isn’t true. As I get older I become more and more convinced that there’s nothing so weird that nobody else does it.
Blogging on my own site is cool and all, but I do use other social media. The indieweb is a nice community, but there are other communities too that I would like to keep in touch with, and they just aren’t here.
There is a reward for posting on social media: you get notifications as people respond to your posts. Honestly, I like seeing the number on the bell icon tick up more than the actual like and such it represents; after all, the notifications are in your face, and I’m not going to go looking at the numbers on each individual post.
So I hoard notifications. I wait a day and let them build up as much as I can before I look at them. I want to see how high the number gets.
It helps, of course, that this number is usually small. Getting up to 11 is a pretty good day for me and makes me feel very popular. As I understand it, “large” accounts have no need to scrimp and save their notifications, and have the opposite problem of shutting them up. I don’t imagine there’s much room between those. That’s usually how it seems to be.
What do you do? Do you click that bell as soon as a number pops up? Or do you wait? How many notifications do you typically get?
This is a rewrite of an old post of mine: Notifications (2024) .