When is it okay to pay a compliment?

There’s a well-known phrase that is quite common when someone pays you a compliment before asking for a favour.

It’s not a phrase uttered by the person hoping for a favour but a quick phrase uttered by the person who is being asked for the favour. So, it’s not ‘I would really appreciate it’, it’s not ‘pretty please’ or ‘could I ask for a small favour?’. If you’ve ever complimented someone and then proceeded to ask them for help with something, something they don’t have to do, in return, and right before proceeding to help you, they might have said, ‘Flattery will get you everywhere’. But the next time you ask for a favour but precede it with some kind of compliment, I would think twice.

But often people’s compliments are disingenuous and the person receiving it knows it is fake. I was watching a Korean programme on television last weekend. It was called ‘Boss in the Mirror’ and one of the lady boss’s juniors laughed at her joke in the middle of a meeting with a client. I think she was trying to pander to her boss. It seemed like the lady boss didn’t pick this up but the client they were sitting with openly said ‘she’s fake laughing at you because your joke was not funny’. And she was. They played the frame back and the client was right. Her laughter was not real!

So unless you wish to be caught out by the person you’re complimenting I would make absolutely certain that any compliment I am paying is genuine and heartfelt and not so frequent that they sound like they’ve been rehearsed over and over again.

Now you might think that the person who says ‘flattery will get you everywhere’ might be an egoist who likes to have compliments paid to them even when they know they don’t deserve them. Many bosses are, in fact, like that. They want their subordinates to say great things about them because it feeds their ego and shows them that they are the boss.

Whilst you might be right that the person saying the phrase and then proceeding to help you may be self-centred, it might also be that the person is your friend and simply wants to help you. Or he just genuinely likes to help out people who need him and that, in itself, is enough for him. For a person like that you probably didn’t need to flatter him or her. Sometimes, they might even say, no need to say that, I want to help you. In other words, they caught you!

All that being said, you might notice that many YouTubers out there say, please like, leave a comment and subscribe. Let’s focus only on the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ part of their request.

Why do they ask? Is it because you think that they just want compliments on their work? Are they narcissists who want to hear great things about themselves from people they don’t know? Well some of them might be; we don’t know. But the biggest and only reason most YouTubers ask for your ‘comments, likes’ and ‘shares’ is because they want to grow their channel and without those comments, likes and shares it will never grow.

It’s all to do with the YouTube algorithm which rewards channels that do have the ‘likes, comments and shares’. It does that by pushing them out to other potential viewers as recommended viewing because the algorithm thinks that this channel is getting a lot of engagement, through those ‘likes, comments and shares’, and is, therefore, worth recommending. When that happens more people view it, the watch hours grow and so does the subscriber count. Now you might find that a certain channel has very few subscribers even though their content is really worth watching. You might have thought that the reason for this is because no one likes their work and that’s why no one has liked it. Again not true.

Often the YouTuber might be new and all his friends and family might have subscribed and might even be watching his content but they may not be pressing the ‘like’ button or leaving a comment. And that’s not because they don’t like it but because they don’t understand the importance to the channel growth of doing so. I am a relatively new YouTuber. Some of my friends and former colleagues have subscribed but there are many who have not even pressed the ‘like’ button or subscribed. I have had some friends messaging me on WhatsApp or by email about how good they found my work to be. That is absolutely useless to me! They might as well not say anything at all because none of what they’re telling me by WhatsApp is being registered by the dreaded algorithm that rewards channels with such interaction.

So receiving compliments, or more importantly expecting them or asking for them, is not always about the person asking or the person giving them. It’s about someone or something else, like an algorithm.

Now I don’t know if I should but I’d just like to leave my channel name here for those who might be interested in subscribing, liking and commenting. It’s artgirlfunky. LOL