Social Media and Seductive Round Numbers

1K github contributions in 2025 means something to me because when a few years ago when I first noticed the social-esque profiles of github and saw a guy I knew had over 1K contributions, it scratched that social-comparison-whatever muscle in my mind.

I don't remember when this moment was, but looking back on my profile my contributions by year break down like so:

2021: 2

2022: 89

2023: 419

2024: 613

2025 (so far): 1020

It's not a bad summary of my journey so far into tech. And being a social animal, and having spied on the github graphs of many people, 1K / year is kinda where I hope to stay. I'm jealous of some of my workers, who have more annual commits but all or nearly all falling M-F, but that'll probably never be me.

Other Round Numbers stuck in my social-animal-brain

501 Linkedin Connections

Currently at 362. I want to get to 501 so it'll show me as `500+ connections` and I wish it didn't matter but I feel like it does for just professional legibility and first impressions.

(the teenage version of myself is very disappointed that grown-up-Jake is concerned with the number of Microsoft-friends he has. If you're reading this lol: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-simonds/ )

1K Facebook friends

Honestly similar to github contributions, I have a very specific memory of noticing that a popular person I knew had 1K facebook friends. This was probably ~2008-2009. Similar to github contributions, I remember thinking I didn't know it was possible to have 1K, it seemed like an absurd number.

71 Likes

My most liked post on instagram. Picture is me on a horse(only time I've ever been on a horse) and I'm announcing a positive life update.

Early Reflections on Bluesky & ATProtocol

I'm blabbing about all this because it's been on my mind. And it's been on my mind because I've been just...devouring everything I can find to read and/or learn about AtProtocol recently.

There's so much that delights and excites me. Transparency and 'We can just do things'. Reinstating a chronological feed and realizing, 'Oh my gosh, I really kinda can exert some control over what passes in front of my too-impressionable eyeballs.' Realizing just how insanely locked down and not at all transparent other social experiences are.

A brief list of insane things that are normal with the current status quo:

I always check youtube notifications because one out of every 10 is someone commenting on one of my few videos, and my couple videos technical tutorials so I care to keep up and answer any questions. But 9 out of every 10 are just trash notifications pumping engagement. And maybe there's a setting deep in the settings menus that would let me change that? I'm a software engineer and the task of trying to figure that out feels too rich for my blood.

Linkedin messages. OMG an even more extreme example. 1 out of 20 is a super important, super fragile connection from someone who had no other way to reach me and I care deeply about responding promptly. The other 19? Ads. Nasty, pretending-to-be-an-opportunity ads.

Not trying to blame/shame/throw shade on people who do this but...its really bizarre to see so much of the back of the head of a child of people I met once at a party 10 years ago. How crazy that we've created these spaces that we feel an obligation to participate in but also have ZERO trust in.

'link in bio'/'link in comments'/'pic for visibility' and all the other incantations you see. I wanna see my friend's links. If I chose to include them in my feed, I want them to have editorial discretion to post whatever and if I don't like it I'll unsubscribe.

It would be mortifying to show another person...

my facebook feed

my youtube feed

my tiktok feed

I recently turned off my youtube algorithm, and was showing some friends what youtube now looks like for me.

Homepage:

And then to actually browse youtube I use the subscriptions tab:

As I was showing them my subscriptions tab, just like I'm showing you here now, it felt really really good to know that the algorithm would pop up some deeply strange uncanny suggestion while they were looking.

It's still personal (and still feels a little weird) to show you a glimpse of the youtube channels I'm subscribed to. But I am 100% in control of what I do and don't subscribe to. I can have ownership over what passes in front of my impressionable eyeballs. A very freeing feeling.