RANT|SATIRE

Shakespeare Gets Shadow-Banned

Or maybe the algorithm simply wasn’t built for iambic pentameter.

Pic Credit- Gustavo Frig on Pexels

I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if Shakespeare were alive today. Not the Shakespeare from our textbooks. Just William. Twenty-six years old, unknown, broke, convinced he had something important to say, and staring at a blank Medium page wondering if anyone would care.

He spends a month writing Hamlet. Every line rewritten. Every scene polished. He finally hits Publish, makes himself a cup of tea, and waits for history to happen. Twenty-three views. Eight of them are his own because he keeps checking whether the number changes.

The comments don’t help much either. One reader writes, “Too long.” Another says, “Can you split this into a series?” Someone else simply asks, “TL;DR?” Shakespeare closes the laptop and spends the next two hours wondering whether soliloquies are still relevant.

Then he discovers writing advice.

Apparently, everything he’s been doing is wrong. His title lacks curiosity. His opening paragraph doesn’t create enough tension. His subtitle isn’t emotional enough. He isn’t writing for readers. He’s writing for himself. What an amateur.

So he adapts.

Hamlet becomes How Overthinking Destroyed My Life Before I Turned Thirty.

Macbeth becomes Five Career Mistakes That Cost Me Everything.

Romeo and Juliet somehow ends up as Relationship Red Flags I Ignored.

The articles perform better.

The writing doesn’t.

That’s the strange thing about writing online. We all say quality eventually finds its audience. It sounds beautiful. It also sounds like something writers tell one another to sleep better at night.

Quality sometimes finds an audience.

Sometimes it gets buried under an article about waking up at 4 a.m., taking cold showers, and becoming financially free before breakfast.

I don’t even dislike the algorithm anymore. It isn’t evil. It isn’t sitting in some secret office laughing at poets. It’s just painfully indifferent.

The algorithm doesn’t ask whether your article changed somebody’s life.

It asks whether somebody stopped scrolling.

Those are completely different questions.

I imagine Shakespeare slowly falling into the same trap the rest of us do. At first, he writes because he has something to say. Then he writes because certain topics perform better. Then he notices longer titles get more clicks. Then he starts checking analytics before brushing his teeth.

Somewhere along the way, he stops asking, “Is this worth writing?”

He starts asking, “Will this perform?”

That question has probably murdered more good writing than bad grammar ever has.

The funniest part is that nobody tells you to change. It happens so gradually you barely notice it. One article performs well, so you write another like it. One topic gets ignored, so you quietly abandon it. Before long, your dashboard knows your writing better than you do.

Analytics should probably come with a warning label.

May cause unnecessary self-doubt.

One week you think you’re brilliant because an article crosses a thousand views. The next week you genuinely wonder whether you’ve forgotten how to write because another article barely reaches twenty. The words feel the same. Only the numbers are different.

Writing is probably the only profession where success and failure arrive wearing exactly the same clothes.

A baker knows when the bread is burnt.

A musician hears when the note is wrong.

A carpenter can measure whether the table stands straight.

A writer publishes an article and spends the next week inventing theories. Maybe the title was weak. Maybe people were busy. Maybe the algorithm buried it. Maybe Mercury was in retrograde. Nobody really knows.

That uncertainty is strangely addictive.

Which explains why writers complain so much and still refuse to stop writing.

Every writer has threatened to quit at least once.

Usually around midnight.

Usually after checking their stats.

Usually followed by opening a blank document the very next morning.

Maybe Shakespeare would’ve done exactly the same thing.

Maybe he would’ve stared at his analytics, sighed dramatically, rewritten the first act of Hamlet for the seventh time, and convinced himself that readers just weren’t ready yet.

Or maybe he would’ve ignored the numbers completely, shut the dashboard, and gone back to writing the next play.

I like to believe the second version.

Not because it’s romantic.

Because if Shakespeare had spent all his time refreshing analytics, he probably would’ve never finished Hamlet.

And four hundred years later, we’d all be quoting the algorithm instead.

Thanks you Leonard Tillerman sir for providing this platform for ranting writers like me who can write freely under your wings. tagging all my old writer buddies here some are active, some have stopped writing altogether, some, like me have came back, TzeLin Sam Tejasvani Thakur Bindusmita Das Bin Jiang Anum Cami Jahnavi NaHiSh WriteS Ruth Francise John Hansen PAL Felipe Leon U. Praise Frank Marcus Musick Shivani Vishnoi Joonas Väre Linda Rittenhouse . Yana Bostongirl Niz I am definitely forgetting many though.