The Spike and the Tollbooth

The Wicked Witch Of The Web

I have seen this pattern before, which is why I recognise it now without much emotion attached. The shape is always the same, even when the medium changes. First there is promise, then silence, then a sudden, inexplicable burst of attention, followed by a slow withdrawal. Just as you begin to wonder what you did wrong, the answer arrives neatly packaged: send money.

I first encountered this rhythm years ago, back when websites were still spoken of as places rather than products. You were told that if you built something useful, something honest, people would eventually find it. Discovery was presented as a natural property of the web itself, like gravity. Search engines were framed as librarians rather than landlords.

So I built. And refined. And paid specialists who assured me that visibility was a technical problem with a technical solution. Optimisation, consultancy, campaigns. Over time the numbers grew large enough to become abstract — sixty thousand pounds, all told. Not stolen, not misappropriated—simply absorbed. In return I received graphs, reports, reassurances, and a persistent sense that success was just one more adjustment away.

What never arrived was proportionate return. Not because the work was bad, or irrelevant, or dishonest, but because the rules had changed quietly while everyone was still playing the old game.

Visibility was no longer something you earned; it was something you rented. The web had discovered tollbooths.

Years later, the same pattern reappears in video form. I upload steadily for a long time. The response is muted, sometimes vanishingly small. Then, one day, a video reaches thousands. Nothing about it is radically different. No sudden leap in quality or relevance. Just a spike—clean, sharp, and intoxicating. Proof of possibility.

After that, the numbers slide back again. Not abruptly, but politely. As if to suggest that the spike was a glimpse of what could be normal, if only I were willing to help things along. And there it is, waiting in the wings: promotion, boosting, paid reach. The implication is never stated outright, but it does not need to be. I have seen this move before.

This is not a con in the sense of deception. Nothing here is false. The spike is real. The audience exists. The system works exactly as designed. That is the uncomfortable part. It is a system optimised not for truth or craft or even popularity, but for dependence. Scarcity is not a bug; it is the business model.

The psychological mechanism is elegant. Starve the creator long enough for doubt to set in. Reward them just enough to confirm that the work has value. Then withdraw the reward slowly, so the loss feels personal. At that point, payment appears not as extortion, but as assistance. You are not buying attention, you are “unlocking” it.

Engineers recognise this pattern immediately when they step back from it. It is classic feedback control: intermittent reinforcement produces the strongest behavioural lock-in. Slot machines use it. So do variable interest rates. So now do creative platforms.

What changes with age, I think, is not intelligence but immunity. I am no longer trying to prove myself to a system whose incentives are misaligned with my values. I am not building a career, or a brand, or an exit strategy. I am documenting things I find interesting, truthful, or quietly revealing about the world I have lived in.

When someone leaves a comment in the first handful of views and it makes me laugh, that is not a failure of scale. It is a confirmation of signal. A thousand indifferent viewers are worth less than one attentive one. In my own video work, it may take only a hundred or fewer attentive viewers to make the effort worthwhile.

So I do not pay the toll. I let the spike be what it was: a glimpse, not a promise. I continue to publish at a human pace, for human reasons. The work remains, whether amplified or not. That, in the end, is the only part not owned by the platform.

Perhaps this essay itself is a relic—an object from the moment when the internet finally completed its shift from commons to enclosure. If so, let it sit quietly. Not as a warning, and not as a complaint, but as a record of recognition: the point at which I saw the tollbooth clearly, and chose to walk past it.

PS: in my opinion it all relates back to pimping!