Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
If we can go back to vinyl records and film cameras, we can go back to blogs and RSS feeds.
The common excuse is that no one will go back to blogs or RSS feeds. Yet we never say the same about film cameras or people that buy vinyl records. Sure, if we mean people as in everyone, then sure, no one will go back. But vinyl sales continue to rise, and people keep taking photos with film cameras.
Do we need permission from the masses before we do something that might bring us joy?
“We are not worried about the meme situation,” said photographer Antonio Guilliem in a 2017 interview with Intelligencer.
I’ve been on a lot of Zoom calls this week with my Escape Pod offering via Social Media Escape Club.
I remember being exhausted from scrolling through multiple social media channels everyday. Twitter. Instagram. LinkedIn. Back to Twitter. Over and over, throughout the day.
I would spend hours every day posting, replying, sharing, DMing, ping ping ping. All day long.
Now I spend hours every week with people who are engaged, filled with the energy of making good work.
Oooh, a wonderful resource of SLASH PAGES:
“Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like
/now,/about, or/uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.”
Thanks Mikey Seay.
Olivia Rafferty on one of the ways you can gamble… er, I mean invest in your career:
His course on Meta adverts for Spotify conversion was £150. Plus I’d have to have at least £10 a day to spend on adverts.
It’d be worth it, to get the numbers on Spotify up. Worth it, to get new ears on my songs. Worth it, to look credible to future bookers and collaborators.
It was a good investment into my art.
£300 to Zuck, £150 to this guy, and… minus £450 to me.
Worth it, right?
I’d be sending money to Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, to then drive engagement to Daniel Ek’s platform, so that I could receive…
£0.003 per play.
Worth it… right?
Thankfully Olivia went to the Austrian alps instead.
Being your best, whole, most complete and fulfilled self will help your career more than giving your money away to the techbro industrial complex.
Here’s an interview I did with Olivia, talking about how she quit Spotify and made her latest album.
I see this so much on Substack Notes: “I wish the algorithm…”
STOP! Stop wishing a computer in the cloud is going to deliver your new favorite band, some cool new writer – the algorithim can only process 1s and 0s, and by doing so turns all “content” into 1s and 0s, so just stop with this belief that if only the algorithm were better you’d be able to know about better stuff.
It’s all bullshit. Don’t rely on computers to discern editorial quality, or help you discover.
Don’t let AI take these jobs of editors, curators, DJs, writers, and various other conveyors of taste and fine art.
Via Stephen Moore’s Trend Mill:
“A lot of people seem to actually enjoy AI-generated content, and are ready to eat up more. We should have seen that coming. There’s a simple explanation — too many people have become so lost in platforms, so dictated to by algorithms, ‘for you’ feeds and suggested content, that we’re collectively losing our taste.”
Everything has been reduced to bits. Cleaned up, covered with a vanilla scent, and optimized to keep you tied into whatever platform you think is somehow “good.”
Friends are filters. People are guides. Pick up something in print that still requires some editorial discernment, or find your local college radio station. Email the writers of the newsletters you like. Go find some blogs again.
Moore is right, we’re collectively losing our taste, and we’re become helpless babies being spoon fed whatever media someone else wants us to consume.
When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.
When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.
I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.
I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?
I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.
Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.
“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”
True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”
This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.
In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.
From my People & Blogs interview with Manuel Moreale:
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
Honestly, no. WordPress and the hosting and such works fine for me. I don’t care much about the name, or the theme, or whatever. The blog is 100% for me.
“I write to remember,” as the lyrics go in ‘One Armed Scissor’ by At the Drive In.
Read the rest here.
Your next big break is probably right under your nose. Your next sale, job, whatever.
“Marketers face a choice every day: hustle for new people or serve the ones who care. Activation is much more productive than persuasion.” Seth Godin
The most frequent question I get with my Email Guidance offering is “how do I get more subscribers,” and I never answer it. Instead, we dig deeper into their existing audience, asking “are you 100% that everyone on your current email list knows about your thing?”
And if so – is your website set up in a way that makes it easy for them to support your work?
For one, I can’t believe I still have this. But two, yes, that’s not just a typo on the business card, it was the logo on the music blog for probably a year or two, as well.
