A special thank you to a close friend and mentor for suggesting I do this. In many ways, it’s proof that you can increase your surface area for luck by just putting stuff out there and letting others respond. On that note, I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention another friend who in one of the few conversations we had this year, was the catalyst for me to start back up this enterprise. I’ll talk about luck some other day, but friends really are luck factories (among many other things), so choose them wisely.
Without further ado, you know what time it is.
By far, without question, (and no pun intended) my favorite ritual over the past 8 years has been the QOTD. It started off back in the Snapchat era of 2017 as a way to engage people and build community, and has evolved into one of the areas of my life where I’ve learned the most about how people think. When I started, I was a college senior with no plan but good vibes. And now……. I’ve got a theme song😅
This year, I asked a total of 20 questions.
I received over 248 responses.
The average response count per question was 12.4.
This number sticks out to me because it represents meaningful engagement. No one has to listen to anything I have to say, so the fact that roughly 12 people on any given day care to respond is 12 more than I can ever reasonably expect. (So thank you if you’ve ever cared enough to reply)
The most engaged with question got a whopping 20 responses, while the worst got a meager, but relevant 4 responses.
In hindsight, I suspected both would land where they did, which is a good indication that I might be learning what gets the people going. For the best performer, my hunch was that people would have extremely strong views on the correct answer, and because the set of options was constrained rather than open ended, it made it easy to construct an opinionated answer quickly. For the worst, the exact opposite was true. It was open ended and unclear if people had strong views on what exactly they think. That, coupled with the fact that the topic of the question might be more sensitive to post on a public platform like IG made it tough for people to say something. It’s a good reminder that somethings are better to be inquisitive about in vulnerable spaces only, not public forums.
The longest response to any question was 543 characters, while the shortest was 3.
This is to be expected, given the medium through which I am exposing this. At some point, I might put AI to good use in figuring out the distribution of things like word count and character count over all responses, but for now, a min and max are sufficient.
Since I take screenshots of responses, it’s fun to go back and try to reverse engineer the questions from the answers only. In some cases, it’s only my memory of a particular response that jogs the question since the responses only relate in non-obvious ways. More often than not, though, one response will lead me down the path of thinking it’s a particular question that will later get clarified by another answer. I think those cases indicate that the question itself has lots of conversational doorknobs, or places of interest.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that among respondents, the length of answers can vary significantly depending on the question, but one thing that remains consistent is that people don’t like to explain their reasoning. I chalk some of this up to the format. Posting on my story informally isn’t exactly the kind of thing that should elicit a long-form response, but really, I’m fascinated by how much depth lives in my DMs and want better ways of sharing that with others. (If you have any ideas, send me an email)
I know I probably shouldn’t have favorites, but if I had to pick the question that taught me the most, it was What compliment means the most to you and why? because it’s really a sneaky way of asking What characteristic or quality of yours do you want people to acknowledge? Disguising it as a compliment can sometimes help with the awkwardness that comes with talking about yourself when everyone wants to be humble. I learned a lot because my initial assumption was that most people would focus on things that don’t speak to your character, like your looks or even your intelligence. But in actuality, the people around me care most that others know they’re a good person. That they’re working admirably toward some goal. That they are doing the work necessary to become better people. Selfishly, it also helped me learn how to love others better, in the specific ways that they prefer.
I’ve got a lot of ideas for what I want to do with QOTD next year.
In particular:
I want to find a way to make the collection of responses more automated. (I know ig has a poll feature. No, I don’t want to use it.) The goal here is to make gathering insights like this easier in the future, without sacrificing the manual effort and labor that I put into screenshotting, cropping, and posting the content. I know it seems ridiculous, but in the same way that a handwritten note signals effort, I want people to know that I take the time to ensure their response is posted in the same consistent way. I might build a small app that lets me upload the screenshot and then have it do some OCR and storage in a DB.
I want to make it a more public experience. It’d be great to go to the wonderful streets of NY and get people's answers, but I want to do so in a way that isn’t intrusive to people’s lives. It can be a big ask to have someone pause their day and think about what’s on your agenda. Conversely, there’s something special in my mind about the fact that the only people who can respond today are those in my community, which means that the responses can often reflect a cultural zeitgeist that might be different than that of the rest of the world. I think that’s good, and also helps keep me thinking about what my own community thinks.
I want to be more consistent! In years past, I’ve done hundreds of questions, but this year in particular, between getting married (twice) and settling into an AI startup, things had to fall by the wayside, and this was one of them. Part of my goal here will be to build up a much larger reservoir of questions to help give me more buffer than I’ve traditionally had while also finding new ways to crowdsource great questions from other people. People often ask how I come up with the questions, and the honest answer is a lot of thinking about thinking. I’d love to democratize that in the new year.
More simulations! It would be great to ask questions like “What would you do in this scenario?” and then play a video rather than only having text and voice as the medium.
That’s all for now. The QOTD is and will (hopefully) always be an exploration in human consciousness. An art project born out of boredom that’s led to some of my favorite insights.