Scale of the Internet

Inspired by Scale of the Universe

Posting on the internet compresses your audience to a number on a screen. Just like compound growth, our brains are not well equipped to contextualize the relative size of these numbers.

In this post, I attempt to provide a better intuition for contextualizing audience sizes across orders of magnitude, using visualizations and anecdotes.

Following the contextualizations, I provide reasoning for why our inability to fully grasp audience scale is precisely what makes it possible to create authentic work on the internet.

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1 - 10

1 handshake per second = 10 seconds

Physical corollary: A dinner table

While it may feel like you are posting into the void, it is akin to giving a speech to a table of ten people in meatspace. You’re not “posting online”, you’re giving a thoughtful toast to a small table of people who know your name. Every sentence feels intentional because every person is close enough to see the look on your face as you say it.

10 - 100

1 handshake per second = 1 minute 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A large classroom

You’re giving your 15 minutes of fame presentation to your peers in a high-school-sized room with one to three dozen desks, and people standing up in the back as overflow. Some people may be distracted on their phones, but everyone is present and listening to your words.

100 - 1,000

1 handshake per second = 16 minute 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A large university lecture hall

You’re giving a speech in a tiered lecture theater with the lights shining in your eyes. You can technically make out some faces in the front row, but you can’t track reactions in real time. This is the first scale at which stage fright becomes a real physiological event, as your body recognizes the stakes even if you try to mentally downplay them.

1,000 - 10,000

1 handshake per second = 2 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A sold-out medium-sized concert venue

This is likely the upper limit of humans you’ve ever had in your field of view at once. You aren’t able to see people individually anymore, but rather as a larger organism. If you bombed in front of this many people, you wouldn’t sleep normally for days. If you crushed it, you’d feel invincible.

10,000 - 100,000

1 handshake per second = 1 day 3 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A football stadium

At this scale, the audience stops behaving like humans and becomes terrain. This is the domain of athletes, heads of state, and A-list musicians. The crowd seems like texture, as faces are impossible to discern. Most people live their entire lives without ever being acknowledged by this many humans at once.

100,000 - 1,000,000

1 handshake per second = 11 days 13 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A metropolitan city

You’ve exceeded the capacity of any single synchronous physical space. The entire population of San Francisco stopped what they were doing and paid full attention to your creation: every barista, every commuter, every tourist on a cable car.

1,000,000 - 10,000,000

1 handshake per second = 115 days 17 hours 46 minutes 40 seconds

Physical corollary: A small country

This is approximately the population of Hong Kong and Singapore combined. This is what it means for something to go truly viral on the internet. This is more people than you could meet across a lifetime of dedicated socializing, compressed into a single notification.

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I once said that the early days are the best. It’s still early days for this blog, but it is now less early. Some days, as I’m responding to thoughtful emails, I stare at my view count and attempt to contextualize this audience. Even once you think you intellectually understand them, it still takes constant reminders that these numbers are real. Most days, the view count is just a number, and I am able to freely write as if it is just me and the page.

Other days, I feel the entire weight of this audience staring over my shoulder. The number that I typically interpret as bits on my screen suddenly represents a collection of real people, each encountering these words in the context of their own lives. What is just a number suddenly becomes legible, and I feel the weight of all your hands I have yet to shake.

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Popularity prediction hash: fb99551bce2217061756bfa2e9003d921be03c44efd61d912ea127af8aca364d