A Note from the Editor 
They Like Me! They Really Like Me!

[1]492 words

In March, we added three new features to every Counter-Currents/North American New Right article: (1) a “Tip Jar” donation button, (2) a “Like” counter, and (3) a Facebook “Recommendation” button. (We also added a “Twitter” button, but I am gratified to see that my disdain for Twitter is shared by our readers who have not, to my knowledge, ever “tweeted” about the goings on here.)

First of all, I want to thank all of you who have been using the Tip Jar. One of the reasons we instituted the Tip Jar is to provide encouragement to specific authors. Counter-Currents/North American New Right can’t afford to pay authors for their online work. Not yet, anyway. Thus we created the Tip Jar to allow you to directly support authors you like. The idea is that if one of our authors hits the jackpot from time to time with a particularly good piece, everyone will be encouraged to write more.

But so far, with a couple of exceptions, all of our Tip Jar donations have not been earmarked for specific authors. So if you really want to encourage a particular writer, please be sure to indicate his or her name and the article you like. Paypal allows you to write a note to recipients.

Second, we also added the “Like” and Facebook recommendation buttons to provide quantifiable feedback and encouragement to our authors.

Like most of you, I think that voting, polling, and Facebook are silly. We wouldn’t be elitists if we didn’t.

But our readers aren’t just anybody. You’re special. Your opinions really matter. They matter to us. They matter to our authors. I can personally verify that whenever I look at my articles, the first place my eye goes is to the “Like” and Facebook recommendation tallys, and when they rise, I get a small thrill. All of us feel a bit alienated from the culture around us, so even these little tokens, silly and arbitrary though they may seem, mean something. We feel less alone, like we are not wasting our time and talents.

But these only work if you actually use them. And most of you aren’t. For instance, in April, our most-read, liked, and recommended article was the “Debate on the Northwest Imperative”: 5,616 reads but only 34 Likes, 103 Facebook recommendations, and zero Tip Jar donations. So I know that only a fraction of the readers who like our articles are bothering to click the “Like” counter or recommend our articles on Facebook. Our authors know it too.

But still, I wonder. And they wonder too. Don’t they like me? Don’t they get it? Am I wasting my time? You might think it is silly. It is silly. It is just another aspect of how the internet facilitates insane levels of metastasizing, all-consuming narcissism. If these functions did not exist, nobody would care about them. But now that they are there, please use them. Otherwise, Jef Costello might have a nervous breakdown.