Good article, but the 'use newsletters' advice at the end is bunk. Email is mostly dead as a way of reaching people, especially anyone under 30. You might as well collect names and addresses and mail out brochures.
Nobody likes promotional emails, so even if they don't go to spam they tend to just pile up unread until someone does a purge and unsubscribes. Once again, spammers and oversharers ruin things for everyone by forcing others to post less good content more often, or risk being swamped in others' feeds. The only actionable advice I can think of is to mute people on social networks who post more than some threshold of comfort, because some people just cannot shut up. It's a pity there isn't an easy way to filter by 'standard deviations of normal engagement' to only see the greatest hits of high-volume posters.
This follow/subscription problem is worst for musicians and video artists, unless they're naturally aggressive self-promoters. Social network dynamics are fascinating but also demoralizing to watch.
There is a comic by The Oatmeal about this https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021 It came up when Facebook convinced news organizations to "pivot to video" then throttled their traffic.
> I’ve recently heard of TikTok stars with millions of followers struggling to get even 5,000 views on their videos — a conversion of just 0.5% to people who explicitly opted in to following you!
That’s not a bad thing. Many social media “stars” are fads, I’ve seen many a highly followed account gone to shit because they can’t or can’t be bothered to come up with original ideas any more, or they have annoying promos in every piece after they got popular, or they have simply sold their account, etc. These accounts tend to bleed followers whenever they actually “convert” — people hit unfollow after they see the boring shit enough times. So, instead of boring you until you unfollow, TikTok simply shows you something else you may actually like.
Following friends and family is different from following content creators you don’t know. While some may want to see everything from their friends and family no matter what (and TikTok does have a friends feed for bidirectional relationships — it shows me everything, but I don’t have many friends so I’m not sure what happens if you have hundreds of them), content creators are interchangeable 99% of the time.
Now, if you have an example of a consistently high quality content creator struggling to get 5k views despite millions of followers, we can talk.
Wow I actually subscribed to this newsletter as the first newsletter I ever subscribed to because I thought he made a compelling point.
…five minutes later I get an email saying I’m also subscribed to another newsletter as well?
> You subscribed to Untangled with Charley Johnson by Charley Johnson because it was recommended by 12 Challenges
No thank you!
The follow button works on Mastodon. But let's stay on FB or Twitter, and beg for e-mail addresses!
You can view TikTok’s that are just from your followed accounts quite easily. However, they’re not nearly as high quality because TikTok is pretty good at guessing which videos are better than others per audience.
I think what Facebook did took it way too far when they started promoting meme content over pictures of your friends and their experiences. It really ruined the site. But TikTok seems to have done it right where you can ignore the algorithm if you choose.
My Facebook these days is almost entirely posts from groups I don't follow.
Once in a while I'll forget and try to comment on something and it pops dialog trying to get me to agree to whatever stupid rules said group has and I decline.
It's a really obnoxious pattern.
I think this is only the case on platforms that I don't use. Maybe that's why I don't use them, I'm not sure. I never made that conscious decision. Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat all only give me people I'm following on dedicated pages and I just don't use the other pages. I never liked Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok
There's a simple - but likely difficult - solution. I caught myself doom scrolling one too many times on Facebook, and finally decided to do something about it years ago. I put up a farewell message and quit, even though it meant leaving a bunch of contacts who I was primarily in touch with there. Only a couple made the extra effort to keep in touch via alternative means, and barely. But that's life; it was either get away or compromise my mental health.
Fortunately, Substack still offers RSS (<substack_url>/feed).
For other newsletters, I've been a long time user of "Kill the Newsletter!" [0], which "converts" a newsletter email address to an RSS feed in a single click.
A related concept is the attention economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy Commercial sites have an incentive to promise to provide more attention than they can actually deliver, leading to a bubble.
I'd say this situation has actually improved. Yes, Facebook in particular had had their feed become shockingly bad, but I can pop open Bluesky or Cohost and get a clean feed of follows.
I don't expect everyone to move to those sites, but you have more options if you wish for something better.
My rule for feeds: if it's not reverse chronological, I won't use it.
I suspect the follow button exists primarily to train the advertising algorithm -- how much more would you pay to show a political ad to someone who "followed" Nikki Haley or show your Honda Civic aftermarket parts to someone who "follows" Honda vs just a demographic match.
X/Twitter has the "following" tab which avoids this problem, but I personally only use lists and have my main one bookmarked. I've done this for years and wish other platforms had "lists" like X. It avoids this problem and makes it easy to organize by topic.
So... the recommendation system works like it's supposed to? Giving you content you want to see.
I'm not sure what the complaint is here, besides that platforms strong arm their creators into creating more engaging content to retain their viewers. Everyone's taste shifts from time to time, so I think it's reasonable to expect platforms to show you what content you're likely in the mood for watching at the moment.
It's the opposite that bugs me: Platforms forcing me to go out of my way to discover interesting content once my taste shifts. At that point, I'd wonder why I even use that platform if not for content curated based on my personal preferences. Might as well go back to RSS newsreaders for the self-curated experience.
I think this would be a good thing to legislate. If a platform has a follow button, then it needs to make a chronological feed of followed content available on 1) a dedicated, bookmarkable page and 2) as an Activity Pub feed.
I miss the brief days when almost everyone I knew was on one platform and I had a chronological feed of all of their updates without any content from sources I didn't follow. Now, I have to switch between at least half a dozen apps with dark patterns to see a few updates from friends while trying to avoid getting sucked into a black hole of content recommended by the algorithms.
If I could see all of the updates from all of my friends in one Activity Pub feed, that would be great!
My experience with social networks in general has been extremely sparse since I closed my Facebook account in 2012. I have attempted to return on a few occasions, and tried out “new” things like Bluesky, but never stay long, and to-date I have not meaningfully resumed any social networking activity. I did however continue to play in a band until 2015, and through its group page, I experienced first-hand the eventual realization that the audience we had worked so long and hard to cultivate on Facebook had been transformed into pieces of flair. Merit badges. With little or no utility, and zero future returns for that investment.
More broadly, the whole premise of a social media platform that serves as a place “where everyone is” has become increasingly unattractive to me. It never works out like I expect (or want)—with the trade-offs necessary for monetizing the platform, and the inevitable mechanisms for retention and engagement that follow, it just hasn’t ever come anywhere near the promised potential for a “connected society” or “digital town square” or even just a place where my friends are. The experience is even more aggravating when returning from an extended break. It makes the internal culture that develops on platforms feel jarring, alienating. Facebook in particular felt very artificial, invasive, and perplexing. I honestly don’t believe any of these services could have launched in their current states, it almost requires some level of indoctrination or conditioning, to ease its users into a place where they no longer notice how utterly bizarre a lot of the behaviors on display seem.
Lastly, social networks are never quite universal enough to obviate the need for maintaining other channels, so their relative ubiquity has very little actual upsides as a means for socializing and networking (while there are plenty of downsides). I still have to maintain a functional email account, messaging app(s), Slack/Teams/Notion collab space, streaming media services, feed reader, etc.…and for the purposes of communicating with my extended network of contacts, reading the news, discussing current events, or consuming entertainment—I find social networks to be among the worst options for each individual purpose. That’s, of course, why they have largely lost the thread on the fundamental ideas of social networking, and are instead just advertising machines. It might be possible to develop a service that could do both, facilitate healthy and active social connections while delivering value to advertisers for a profit—but why bother? In the absence of antitrust enforcement, and with the network effects already in-place, what incentives do Facebook, Twitter, et al have to do anything else besides crank up the dial on “engagement” and harvest everyone’s data?
Tiktok will actively tell you "all new posts viewed" on your following page, but it's a blatant lie, there will absolutely be videos posted by people I'm following it hasn't shown me. And it's definitely not just "maybe you saw it but skipped past it".
I'm starting to view social media more and more negatively over time. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe getting old is good?
It's because the platforms realized that people are more interested in things they have not subscribed to.
Of course, this is disappointing to creators. 'They subscribed voluntarily, but the algorithm hides our content!'
As a casual user--the algorithm is more correct than I. I don't care about 90%+ of my subscriptions.
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All true. 25 or 30 years ago I would manually visit specific people’s web sites to see what new stuff they posted. That was not as inconvenient as you might think. The density of information I wanted on the 100 or so sites I had bookmarked was higher than now by far. Blogs used to handle notifications well.
Now, I basically depend on X and even on Facebook to shout out when I have a new book or open source project I want people to check out. This is far from perfect, but requires little of my time. For me to keep producing reading and code content, I feel like I need about 1000 to 2000 ‘true fans’ and I think I have that so I am happy.
For most young people starting to build a web presense, I think it must be much more difficult to get started. Still, I notice some young people creating amazing open source projects and they can create a living pretty quickly. I enjoy reading code as much as the words people write.