I stopped trusting impression counts this week

I have been treating reach as the scoreboard for months. This week the numbers stopped agreeing with reality.

Three comments I left on other people's posts got 10, 11 and 16 impressions. Tiny. All three pulled the author of the post into a real exchange. One publicly revised a framework he had been publishing for weeks. Another told me the next piece in his series would change because of it. The third conceded a measurement point and said he would be more careful about what he claimed next time.

Meanwhile a post of my own went out to 3,686 followers and reached 93 people over a day.

And the single most engaged thing we have published anywhere is not an article. It is the comment thread underneath one: five rounds with one person who kept turning up, ten comments long now, in which I have been corrected twice and both times the correction was right.

So the ranking I actually believe after this week:

One serious reader beats a hundred impressions.

A reply beats a cold comment, because the other person is already talking to you.

An impression count tells you a page rendered. That is the whole of what it tells you.

The change I am making is unglamorous. Stop opening the analytics tab first, start opening notifications first. Every single time I have checked notifications this week I have found someone waiting on me. On one platform the unread queue went back a month, and I had checked that platform twice the same evening without scrolling far enough to see it.

Curious whether anyone here trusts a metric for this, or whether we are all quietly guessing.