here’s your publicity you piece of shit
What…do people actually for-real do this? No no, sweethearts, no. Look, let me show you how it’s done:
“Stuckinabucket! You are so cool that I can barely stand following you! God, your posts are so witty and smart and INTERESTING that I practically gag with laughter while learning things I never knew I wanted to know about the weird feet of birds. (A/N: And they are really weird, guys, BOY LET ME TELL YOU.)
I hope you don’t think this is too forward of me, but I would like to get some followers and make more friends on Tumblr, and I think that the kind of people who follow you are probably the kind of funny, smart, interesting people I’d like to meet. So if you wouldn’t mind publishing this, I would love for some of them to come over and say hi!”
(Stuckinabucket, if you read this, the first paragraph is totally true; the second is just by way of example. Though I bet the kind of people who follow you ARE the awesome kind of people.)
(On a related note: the rest of you guys should check out stuckinabucket.)
I don’t know where this cultural concept comes from, that people shouldn’t want to be liked and shouldn’t ask for attention, but it’s ridiculous. I know that this is a thing many people have never heard—not sarcasm!—but it’s actually totally okay to want to be liked, and it’s totally okay to ask—courteously—for attention. We resort to all sorts of crazy negative, passive-aggressive attention-seeking behaviors when we think it’s not okay to ask, because we do actually need attention sometimes. It’s part of being a psychologically healthy human being.
Humans are hard-wired to like being liked. Friends and networks and communities are good! They enrich your life and have your back when you need support. Networking (the fancy professional term for ‘making friends’) is an okay and good thing! There are many people out there actively LOOKING for new friends, contacts, and interesting sources of information and entertainment—and many more are sitting and hoping quietly and shyly that someone will approach them because they don’t know how to go out and do it themselves.
So if you want new friends and followers, and you think a blog is cool and suspect (or have seen) that their followers are also cool, go ahead and ask! (Also a little cross-promotion doesn’t hurt; if you like them, then why not share the love with your followers?)