The strange art of announcing you're going to bed online

Announcing sleep on the internet: 53 replies to an empty message

Saying you're off to bed in a digital community is an act of utter banality. It doesn't move the GDP, the stock market or house prices. And yet it keeps collecting replies: 53 over 527 days. Something is going on.

The mechanics of the goodnight post

The author of the message keeps repeating variations on the same idea. First he announces he's going to sleep. Then that he's had lunch and is off for a nap. Later he confesses he isn't sleepy but is going to bed anyway. There's even a bout of insomnia: he gets up, turns on the computer, puts on the third season of Aranyélet, makes a coffee and lights a cigarette. All of it, in front of the community's audience. A real-time sleep diary, unfiltered and pointless.

The response: humour, provocation and the mysterious 'bump'

The community doesn't stay indifferent. One person compares the scene to an Alien prequel. Others wish him nightmares about something we won't repeat here. And then there's the word "bump", repeated ad nauseam. In online forum slang, bumping is a way of pushing a message back to the top of the list. Here it becomes a mantra, a mechanical heartbeat keeping alive a thread with nothing to say.

The value of nothing

After 527 days, the post is still there. It's a fossil of the digital age, a reminder that content doesn't need substance to generate interaction. Attention, that scarce commodity, is generously granted to anyone announcing their sleep cycle. Perhaps it's the perfect example that, on the internet, the emptiest things can be the most visible.

If someone says "I'm off to bed" and 53 people reply, the question isn't why they said it, but why we listen.