[The Bookshelf of Respect] 📊 The person who created the note ranking didn't believe in numbers more than anyone else. ── Shiroi Books "Shiroi"

"There is a note ranking that is updated every week..."

The very fact that there was something called a "note popularity ranking" was something I had heard of by name for a long time.
In the first place, there is no official ranking feature on note. So, even when I heard the name, I honestly didn't have much of an idea what it was. I had never actually looked at the content properly, not even once.

This time, prompted by a recommendation from a follower, I decided to take a good look at it for the first time.

The page I peeked at had a world spreading out beyond what I had imagined.
Unique indicators such as average likes, growth, enthusiasm, and stability are lined up for the top 1500, and it continues to be updated every week. Moreover, this is not corporate work, but something created by a single individual as an extension of a hobby.

And, the design philosophy was written on the ranking page itself.
The number of followers has little to do with whether an article has substance or is truly being read thoroughly by readers. Therefore, this ranking calculates a unique score by combining several indicators of different natures, such as the number of likes on recent articles and the pace of follower growth. It was also explicitly stated that the intention was to prevent accounts without substance, which are operated mechanically solely for the purpose of exposure, from getting high scores as much as possible. Not intentionally using the easiest metric to understand, the number of followers. At the point of this initial choice, it was already not an ordinary ranking.

Who on earth is this person?

Out of such simple curiosity, I decided to follow the person named Shiroi.

The person behind the numbers

The first thing I was curious about was simply "who made this and why?"
Tracing the operator's information, I found out that a person named Shiroi also does publishing work under the name Yoshitaka Iwata.
Originally a software engineer, he turned to writing in 2024 and launched a personal publishing label called Shiroi Books. Not a corporation, he handles everything alone, from writing to book design and publishing tasks.

I noticed one more thing.
Shortly before starting note under the name Shiroi, he apparently let go of another name he had been using for over 10 years from the internet. Leaving only his skills and experience, and resetting everything else for a while. I found this quite interesting as well.

Looking around the site a bit more, I noticed that the related tools were not limited to just the ranking.
Popular Article Ranking,Hidden Popularity Ranking,Reader Analysis Service,Tool to find accounts that are mutually enthusiastic readers, and evenBluesky version of the popularity ranking.... Just counting them, quite a few services seem to be run by one person's hands. Moreover, these were not planned from the beginning, but are said to have been born derivatively as he thought of them, while using the data collected in the process of making the ranking.

Around this point, I became interested in more than just a "creator of convenient tools," and I started reading his past articles, going back little by little. Then, I found that the origin can be traced back to his teenage years.
At that time, Shiroi was developing games individually and releasing them on the internet as free software. In an era before smartphones and app stores, he apparently even had the experience of being featured in magazines and on CD-ROM supplements.
As I read, it made sense to me that programming must have been Shiroi's first field of expression.

Among the services, there are not only practical ones but also some unusual ones. It is an automatic conversation bot called "Purusuka-chan" running on Bluesky.

It seems that while learning from followers' remarks, it replies when spoken to. Seeing that he makes not only useful tools like rankings but also such playful creations, I am made to think that he must be a creator at heart.

Moreover, there is no sign of these hands stopping at all. While I was writing this article, a new checker was released to detect signs of fraud such as inflating the number of likes and followers.

If he has been running at this pace for years, then perhaps creating has become like breathing for him.

There shouldn't be many people who call such tool development a "change of pace" alongside the job of a writer.
Even so, he insists that it is merely an extension of a hobby. Isn't it a bit too serious to call it a hobby? Holding onto that slight snag, I reached for the next article.

Another face

Shiroi, who is an engineer and a writer, had another face: a musician. He started playing the concertina, a traditional Irish instrument, in 2015, and it is said that he sometimes performs in front of people.
According to him, this music greatly expanded his human relationships and gave his life a sense of meaning, and he does not think of it in the category of a mere hobby.
This experience culminated in his first book, "A Guide to Continuing and Improving Musical Instruments for Working Adults."

On the other hand, Shiroi has recently written a new book titled "A Book for Getting By Even If You Are Not Good at Human Relationships."

A person who has expanded their connections with others through music has also written a book about their struggles with human relationships. Perhaps writers are creatures who want to put both their strengths and weaknesses into words.

They also have a face as an investor. They have published an introductory book on stock investment, which begins with the blunt premise that "there is no such thing as an easy way to make money," and argues that the essence of serious asset formation lies in the steady persistence of being able to buy and wait for decades without doing anything. Instead of flashy winning strategies, they write head-on about boring patience, even though it is supposed to be an introductory book on investment. Here, too, we can see the same attitude of writing about plain things in a plain way.

Returning once again to their face as a musician.
In the final chapter of the book on musical instruments, they write about the reasons for continuing to play an instrument.
It is not about what others think of you, but about what you yourself find value in; that is the only issue.
Why would one want to continue on a plain, unprofitable path? What lies there is something that, in the end, can only be called subjective—that is what was written. Even though it is supposed to be a book about musical instruments, it reads as if it is talking about something much larger.

Curious about the thinking behind the writing, I went back and looked at some older articles. As people who influenced them, they listed names such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, and the religious thinker Krishnamurti. To be honest, I did not know any of their names. When I looked them up out of curiosity, I learned that although their positions were different, they were people who advocated relying on one's own inner experience and intuition rather than blindly accepting externally imposed truths or authorities. The Shiroi Books philosophy also has an item called "Subjectivity," and this is exactly the same voice as the passage in the instrument book.

There was also an article about their thoughts on the act of writing itself.
It was written to the effect that if there is any meaning in being written down, it is when an expression is given for the first time to a sensation that had not yet been put into words.
The writer first understands something, and then the reader realizes, "This is my story, too." Meaningful words can only be born in that order. This core of their writing style connects to the topic of the next chapter.

A single core called sanctity

While chasing after their multiple faces, I suddenly came across one article. In it, something like a core connecting the faces I had seen so far was clearly put into words.
It is an article that states that what Shiroi-san asks of note writers boils down to just two things.
I want you to write what you are thinking. I do not want you to write what you are not thinking. That is all. They are two simple points, but while reading, I wanted to confirm my own way of writing.

According to the pinned article, this article has had a large response in the past among Shiroi-san's notes. They themselves wrote that what they want to convey through books and notes might boil down to this one point. I want you to live as you are. That is all.

And it seems that Shiroi-san does not deny generative AI itself. However, they do not look favorably upon publishing text output by AI as if it were one's own words without any annotation. That is likely because it touches upon the latter of the two points mentioned earlier—writing as if you are thinking something when you are not. There is an idea there that one's own inner self, the inner self of a stranger, and the act of a person speaking in their own words should all be treated with equal importance. Using the slightly grand word, "sanctity."

A similar sentiment seems to be directed toward animals as well. They wrote that they do not particularly like AI videos that assign cute, child-like lines to dogs, cats, or small birds. This may not be a sentiment everyone agrees with, but to me, it seemed that the idea that "animals also have their own dignity as beings" flows from that text. In fact, Shiroi-san lives with a partner named Fumiko, a white Java sparrow, and she frequently appears in images within their notes. This passage might be words that came from a realization about a familiar presence rather than an exaggerated claim.

Not leaving ambiguous things ambiguous. That kind of sensibility seems to be reflected in the length of their books. Their third book exceeded 200,000 characters, and they wrote in a year-end review article that they had intended to keep the fourth book compact, but it ended up exceeding 170,000 characters. There was also a self-deprecating sentence: "I guess I cannot write short stories." People who do not want to treat someone else's words lightly probably cannot cut down their own words so easily either.

The person who makes rankings that quantify others actually believes in the sanctity of "a person being themselves" more than anyone else. While reading, I felt a strange sensation.

What the numbers showed, what goes beyond numbers

That strange feeling might be my own assumption. However, as I continued to read the articles, I encountered a research article that seemed to support it. Shiroi-san tallied how many of their followers who had posted in the last three months had "at least one enthusiastic fan who gives a 'like' to all of their last 10 articles."

The result was 64.3 percent. It means that not only among famous noters, but also among people who are just posting normally, a high percentage have loyal fans.

By the way, it seems that Shiroi-san's own note has also grown significantly in the last two years. They wrote in a year-end review article that their follower count was 494 at the end of the first year, but it had reached the 4,200 range by the end of the second year. That is a calculation where the entire digit has increased by one.

However, I learned in another article that there was a completely different year before this growth. For a full year after opening, the number of likes remained almost flat, and there was not even a sign of growth. There was no way for Shiroi-san at that time to know when that state would change. If you look at the graph now, you can say that "the effort was rewarded," but what the person in the middle of it was looking at must have been a record where only a flat line continued. Still, there was a year where they did not stop writing, and beyond that, there are the numbers of today.

Looking at these numbers, at first I thought, "I see, note readers are loyal." But I feel it is not just that. Each of the tallied accounts is more likely to be just a diary or miscellaneous notes, rather than text polished as a product. Yet, they have readers. From a tally meant to make people compete for superiority, the goodwill of someone unrelated to superiority leaks out. It may be that the person who created the numbers was looking at the outside of the numbers the most.

In the conclusion of this survey, Shiroi-san stated the following: The question of why your note is wonderful is not the kind of thing that should be proven by numbers or statistics. It is the same as not needing to objectively prove the charm of a friend or a favorite work one by one.

Even though they are supposed to be talking about numbers, before I knew it, they were talking about what is outside the numbers. When I follow this person, that happens many times.

Rest

As I traced through the articles one by one, I arrived at the origin of the trade name Shiroi Books. It seems there is a symbol called a "rest." It originates from the idea that in music, what leaves the strongest impression is not the loudest sound, but the silent parts. It contains a proposal to temporarily set aside what is being talked about loudly in the world and turn our eyes toward things that are inconspicuous but possess essential value.

They also wrote that they lack physical strength and have more days when they are in poor health. Even so, they view the very fact that they have been able to make continuing to write books a part of a painful and difficult reality as a good thing. The desire to not leave dreams as dreams in the sky, but to replant them in the soil of reality, comes through in every word.

In a year-end reflection article, a slightly ominous phrase, "Work hard or Die," also appeared. Even knowing they lack the physical strength and, honestly, that it doesn't make financial sense, they still choose to keep writing. These were not glittering dream words, but more raw, grounded words. I found that they had written something similar in short form on social media as well.
Regarding a consultation about being anxious about whether one can realize a dream, it was a message saying that while they cannot promise success, they should do it anyway.
Rather than gentle encouragement, it has a ring of pushing someone away, but that is precisely why I think it is a message filled with lived experience.

There is one more story that left an impression on me. It seems that although there were 154 greeting comments received over two and a half years, they became unviewable due to a change in note's specifications. Even so, they wrote that they "keep them carefully at hand." A person who works with large amounts of other people's data, such as rankings, still keeps 154 comments that are no longer visible without throwing them away. I think these two things normally coexist within the same person.

Perhaps many people have already left words about Shiroi-san. Since they are the person who created such a well-known site, that is all the more true.
Even so, I decided to leave this here as a record of my impulse and respect—having felt this person, becoming interested on my own, and wanting to write about them on my own. I have only read a small fraction of the articles, so if there are any points that are off the mark, please point them out.

Perhaps I am also projecting myself onto them a little bit on my own. Stripped of titles and context, how far can one's own words reach someone? The figure of someone quietly testing that is something I cannot think of as someone else's business.

Trying to listen carefully even in places where no sound is ringing. While following Shiroi-san's work, I feel I have been taught once again the importance of such an attitude.

🔔Bell