Newsletter dopamine trap (Ricky Weekly #39)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
It’s getting harder to not hang out with friends IRL especially with amazing weather in SF, so hopefully we can learn to do it while maintaining a safe distance.
Thing on my mind:
I was looking back at my first few newsletters and noticed that they were much shorter and more light-hearted. What changed? Shortly after I started, my first response came from a good friend who I haven’t talked to in a while, and I felt the love. Then more friends responded, identifying with my thoughts and challenging me to think differently. Those feelings were amazing and I started telling people how this newsletter experiment was the best thing ever. Then my brain wanted more responses for the dopamine hit, so I told more people about my newsletter, and I started thinking about trying to get more feedback when I’m writing. The dopamine response took over.
I naively thought I was able to avoid this trap. I remember telling friends that newsletters are great because they’re more obscure than blogs. They don’t have cheap engagements mechanisms like “likes,” so the only way to engage is to reply. There’s even some pressure to reciprocate and type more than just a few words, making the responses really enjoyable to read. But I guess despite all of that, I still ended up in the dopamine trap.
Sounds like I’m gonna stop writing the newsletter huh? Nah. Not yet at least. I like it because it still feels personal, but I also want more people to read it so I can get feedback. The two goals are incompatible I know, and like I said last time, the benefits of more/big tends to trump the benefits of few/small, even if small can be rewarding too. I guess I’ll just have to keep checking in with how I feel.
Piece of content I recommend:
“Notes” by David Tran
Inspired by Nadia Eghbal, my friend David started publishing “notes” to his blog. The “notes” format gets at some of the same things this newsletter is trying to get at—small thoughts that want to exist but are too long for a tweet, not quite ready for prime time or simply don’t want to be.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “From Socialcam to TikTok: How we figured out video social in a decade”