Be Seen. Not Found.

​
Your content has a temperature

You can probably sense it with vibes... but it's actually four dials you can control. And you might be paying attention to the wrong ones.

How hot your content runs has been shaping your risk and your safety this whole time... but you've probably never really paid attention to it (or measured it). It's not about how much you post or how big your following is, but about how likely the stuff you make is to set someone off.

Most of us kind of know our own answer, right? "Oh, I do spicy topics" or "nah, I keep it pretty light." But that vague sense is exactly the problem because you can't make intentional decisions when you don't really understand all the components. So you're stuck just posting and hoping.

Let's actually break it down so you can work with it (and make intentional choices about it).

Hostility isn't bad luck

When you post content that has some heat on it, a sharp take, a divisive topic, a real piece of your personal life, and the hostile responses roll in, you feel it. Whether it's a pile-on, some nasty quote-tweets, DMs from people who've apparently decided you're the enemy... that part's not invisible at all. It's loud and it's the whole reason high temperature content is a risk in the first place.

What's invisible isn't the actual hostility - it's that the hostility was probably predictable. The heat in the thing you posted and the heat that came back at you are connected.

You didn't deserve the hostility, and you didn't ask for it... but it does follow rules and once you can see the rules, you can see it coming, make a call about whether or not you want it, and prepare (instead of getting smacked upside the head with it later).

Because here's how it feels in the moment... you post the thing, the hostility shows up and it feels like weather - like it just rolled up on you out of nowhere. So you brace for it the way you'd brace for a storm that wasn't in the forecast.

But it wasn't random. The hotter the thing you put out, the more hostile attention tends to come back... that relationship is pretty reliable. Weirdly, though, that's good new. Because a thing that follows rules is a thing you can prepare for. You can't stop someone from being awful to you, but you can stop being the person who never saw it coming.

That's what's actually invisible here - not the hostility (you see that just fine). It's that it's forecastable, and no one handed you the weather report.

The pattern we keep seeing Safety doesn't come from sharing less and hoping for the best. It comes from seeing clearly - actually understanding the mechanics of your own exposure, so your choices are deliberate instead of accidental. You can't manage what you can't see.

Know Your Mix

Content temperature - basically how likely your content is to provoke negative attention or an adversarial response - isn't one single thing. It's four separate components (and they can move independently).

You can be cranked all the way up on one and sitting near zero on the rest, but it's the combination that's you're real temperature, not any one of them alone.

• Topic Polarization - how divisive the subject itself is. Information (like tutorials) sit pretty low, while anything explicitly political or identity charged runs high. This is more about how hot the territory is, not your take on it.
• Opinion Intensity - how hard you plant your flag once you're in the territory. You can cover a hot topic pretty evenly, or you can be the person who's known for sharp, no-hedging takes. So the same subject can have wildly different heat.
• Personal Disclosure - how much of your actual life is baked into your content. This one's a little sneaky because it doesn't really feel like a temperature thing, but disclosing more about yourself opens you up to more people having opinions about you. It also impacts the parasocial relationship your audience has with you... more intense relationships can be hotter.
• Controversy Frequency - how often your content actually kicks up heat, whether you meant it to or not. This one is a little bit more symptom than lever, but it's the most honest read of where you really sit because it's measuring what happens, not what your intentions were.

Picture two creators. One's a daily vlogger (low polarization, pretty mild opinions, but disclosure is cranked all the way up). The other's a political commentator (polarization and opinion are maxed out, but almost no disclosure) who doesn't show their face or their life. But if you put them on a single thermometer, they might read almost identical.

They don't have anything in common, though. They've got different people coming after them, different kinds of attacks, totally different fixes. One's exposed through her life, the other through her positions.

Same heat - and the heat matters. It's a real and it's driving risk for both of them. But it's point at completely different danger depending on where it's coming from. So knowing how hot you run is the start, not the finish.

The heat tells you that you're exposed. And the component(s) that generate the heat is the part that tells you how. Two creators can run exactly as hot as the other and still need different strategies to stay safe.
​

Intentionally Calibrate

The four components aren't equally yours to turn (and let's not pretend like they are).

• Opinion Intensity is almost all yours. You decide how hard you want to plant your flag. And just because you had intense opinions before doesn't mean you need to keep having them. Or, vice versa... be as opinionated as you want (just prepare for what comes with it)
• Personal disclosure is yours too. You control what you decide to share of yourself, your life... but a little bit of what's already out is out. And an audience that is used to a certain level of access to your life might push you when you pull it back. So it is controllable for the next post, but less so for the last hundred.
• Topic polarization is yours, kind of. Your subject is usually your whole brand... and your income and the reason people followed you in the first place. So the idea of "just cover less divisive stuff" is often disingenuous about whether or not you can actually do that. Yes, you can do that... but it likely means shifting your platform.
• Controversy frequency you barely control. You can stop courting it, sure. But whether any given post actually blows up is the crowd and the algorithm and the time and luck and, well, probably not you.

And honestly? Some of your heat was never yours to begin with. The room you're in sets the baseline before you ever hit publish. Some niches (gaming, politics, social justice, queer content, true crime) all carry an ambient hostility that has nothing to do with you or your individual choices.

So then... what are you supposed to do?

For sure not "turn yourself down to stay safe. Dimming yourself is just a quieter way of disappearing, and that's not what we're about here. But you need to stop letting your temperature run on autopilot.

• Know where your heat is coming from, not just that it's hot. If it's coming from disclosure, you know what you can fix. If it's coming from your topic, know that there's not much you can do to change it.
• Match your protection to your hottest component. If you're heat is from disclosure, focus on location and life-pattern privacy. If it's coming from opinion, prep for pile-on readiness. If it's about the room you're in, understand that your baseline's already high and prepare accordingly. Different sources have genuinely different defenses.
• Calibrate and make intentional decisions. Heat is often exactly where the reach and the connection and the money are. Turning it up can be 100% the right call (as long as you actually made a call with your eyes open and protection in place). You don't want it to be something you walked into without realizing the hostility was coming. YOU get to chose where and how you show up, so calibrate it accordingly and understand the tradeoffs.

You're never going to be able to control all of it, and you shouldn't shrink yourself down to feels afe. But the creators who get caught the most off guard are almost always the ones who didn't know the dials were there at all... who made decisions by default, not intentional ones.

Your move · This week Where's YOUR heat coming from? Take a look at your content and run it past this filter... polarization, opinion, disclosure, controversy. Which one's carrying most of your heat?

On the Radar

What we're watching

01	Meta backtracked on their Insta AI 'feature'. Last week, we covered a feature Insta added to allow anyone to make AI content with your Insta Images. The backlash was so bad, they pulled the feature 🎉
02	YouTube is working to kill AI slop. Great news for individual creators, but also hope they don't get caught up in it either.

★ Worth your time We're building a thing Want in early on something? We've been building the tool + support version of everything we write about here. It's personalized to you and built to help you actually DO this work instead of just read about it. It opens in August to a small founding group. You get a voice in what we build, and a founding rate that never goes up as long as you keep it, Get on the list →

Stay safe, Susan @ Unpublic

You're getting this because you signed up at unpublic.co. Update preferences  ·  Unsubscribe  ·  Forward to a friend Unpublic, PBC.  ·  600 1st Ave Ste 330 PMB 92768  ·  Seattle, WA 98104-2246