Please stop making “my greatest hits of the year” lists

I’m not doing any “best of 2022” reflections this year. I’ve come to realize that those kinds of reflections are an utter, meaningless waste of time. At best they are irrelevant, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how digital creators and audiences work. At worse they are egotistical noise, just shallow marketing schemes.

I’m so tired of them and want them to stop.

First, these lists misunderstand audiences. If anyone cares about your content, they already showed it. They clicked, commented, reblogged, embedded, social bookmarked it, or whatever. They did this sometime in the past year. They are not likely to care about what other folks did to your content 1–11 months afterwards.

Second, most creators already do this throughout the year, I expect. Platforms usually provide that info on the backend. On my WordPress blog Jetpack gives me plenty of stats, numbers of clicks, referral sources, times of interaction, etc. Medium offers a typically clean chart of a couple of things people do with your stories. Heck, Duolingo gives me a running list of my language learning: time spent, number of words learned, scores gained, and so on. So if you’re a creator and are interested in making popular posts/videos/photos/etc., you’re probably already doing this. You check on individual items to see how they…