Are we looking for subscribers or likes?

I’m pretty sure it’s a given that comments are the most desired thing in a post. If you have 100 followers, but consistently get 100 comments, you’re doing so much better than most people. Likes, though, are a lot less personal, and could be given from a skim read. Followers or subscribers seem to determine your worth in the internet world, so does that make them more important? 

Recently, my follower count on here has been going up and up and up at a crazy (for me) rate. Like, I’m gaining two or three followers per day. Every time I get that notification that someone new has followed me, I feel a little bit special. It’s a big deal to get a new follower! With my YouTube channel, it happens on an even bigger scale. I don’t have very many subscribers, so every new person that clicks subscribe feels like a huge success for me, more so than on a blog where I already have a fairly large number. To me, I feel a lot of love from a new subscriber or follower, because they actually like my content in general, not just one post. At least, that’s how I choose to follow people. Maybe they just scrolled through and liked the general look of the topics I write about, or maybe they read a couple of posts and really enjoyed them. Either way, it shows to me that they like me more than just this one post. 

And that’s where I feel that a like is really different. A like says, hey, I also liked that book you gave a positive review to, or I agree with your views on LGBTQ+ rights, or whatever it happens to be. It doesn’t say, in my opinion, that they particularly like my style of writing, or that they think my ideas are unique. Just this one particular post, they were pretty fond of. And really, it might have been anyone who wrote this post, they just happened to stumble across mine. Don’t get me wrong, I always appreciate a like. At least it means they enjoyed what I’m talking about! And of course I love every single person that likes my post. 

The thing is, my numbers of likes compared to subscribers are not correlating at the moment. Like I said, my follower count is going up, and it’s amazing! My likes seem to be going down a bit, though? Not hugely, just by a couple, so I’m averaging around 15 likes per post. For someone with nearly 700 subscribers, that seems awfully low. I wonder why that is? And I wonder, should I care, or should I be happy I’m getting so many new followers? What do you think is more important? Let me know, let’s chat about it!