Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
We’re in 2025 and websites are still jamming as many ads as possible onto every nook and cranny. There are eight display ads on this one page, every three paragraphs.
Absolutely boggles the mind that this is the best we’ve come up with, the only way we can make it work.
Consider 1,000 true fans? Fuck no, how about 1,000 display ads? That’s all this is.
The last three days I’ve been putting my phone away. Out of site. Going for walks without. Reading a book while making coffee. Checking for anything urgent when I get home from the gym or grocery shopping.
My average for the week us under an hour, a definate improvement from the week prior of five hours per day. It all adds up, watching YouTube clips while eating lunch, checking emails while on a walk, or getting off the treadmill, or getting in the car from the gym, or then checking again when I get home. Too. Much. Input.
I’ve been sleeping like a champ, and I think lower the level of inputs has been good for recovery from my runs. I ran over 5 miles on the treadmill the last two nights, when in the previous few runs I could barely muster 3. I was just wiped out.
All that to say – put your phone away. Delete stupid apps. Stop checking for emails. Read a book while waiting for your water to boil.
From Queen Kwong in ‘Why Quitting Spotify Won’t Help Indie Musicians,”
“indie artists like me can’t afford tо ignore and abandon Spotify, nо matter how much we despise it. If I want tо book a live gig, a promoter will check my streams first. If I want tо get label interest, A&R will glance at my numbers before deciding іf I’m relevant enough tо even respond to.”
This is also true for social media – some media outlets won’t feature you if you don’t have a big enough social media following. See, they think when they publish your feature, then you’ll share it with your big social media audience.
Which is fun, since we all know barely 5% of anyone’s audience will see that feature from the band’s social media feed.
But then, with Spotify numbers – they can be fudged, right? You can artificially boost those numbers. Make a song called “lofi-beats playlist” and hope for the best.
I wrote this a few years ago:
Right now Spotify is for the masses. Easy to consume. It’s a never ending buffet, and while your music is on the menu, you’ll never make enough to buy groceries for the week.
Lots of truth in this statement, not just in a big “PR SALES!” sense, but even in how we talk about what we do with friends, and other people in our creative orbit.
Many artists would love for the “art to speak for itself,” but that’s not the world we live in anymore. There is simply too much art, music, news, drama – EVERYTHING – for things to speak for themselves.
Everything has its volume cranked to 11, and it never ends, and there’s more being added every minute, every hour, every day.
We get better at talking about the work by talking about it, not by trying to scream just as loud as everyone else.
Posting on social media can be like screaming, since we all have to scream to get attention on those platforms. We have to dance, or use the right trending audio, or hashtags.
Talking, though, is a lost art. How many people do you know that don’t even like talking on the phone with friends? Let alone creative directors, or booking people, or potential clients?
Talking is a lost fucking art, but it’s exactly what we need to get back to.
I’ve been reading Apple / Mac blogs since like 2003. Started with MacRumors, and of course found the almight Daring Fireball, and have been checking those at least once a day for over… 20 years.
But I think I’m done.
Everything now just wants to have some AI element, or an even thinner iPad… my new MacBook Pro M3 is fucking FANTASTIC. Such a great computer. I love it so much.
But I think I’m good. I just need a solid laptop and… that’s it.
Maybe you remember the Humane Pin rollout, and how it got trashed. I was reminded of this from a new post from The Verge, saying “Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales.”
That seems bad.
It was released April 11th. Marques Brownlee put out his review a few days later (April 14, 2024).
Surely by now Humane has probably improved things, right?
I went to the website, to investigate.
Aside from some special offer banner (where you still need to shell out $700), there’s a video in the upper left corner.
Holy shit, the video is from March 17th. That’s BEFORE the pin came out. Before the bad reviews.
So then I reluctantly look on Twitter, and of course there it is, the full circle of Mullet Marketing.
Rather than put this full list of updates and new features on their actual website, they put it on social media.
Look, if you’re a business and all that, sure, put stuff on social media. But why neglect your website? Why not put this list of features in a place you control, just 200 pixels away an ORDER button.
Bethany has uploaded multiple videos on Twitter since the release, like this:
Not one bit of this “social evidence” on their own website, though.
Believe it or not, not everyone is even on Twitter. Not everyone would think to look up the co-founder and CEO of the company on Twitter.
This is classic Mullet Marketing; putting your most up to date information, details, features on social media (party in the back), then feature a months-old video on your website (business in the front).
All it takes is a blog or “UPDATES” section on a website… take these videos, copy and paste the text, and boom, it’s on the wide open web for anyone with a web browser to find, watch, and maybe even BUY your product.
This was created with human intelligence (if it wasn’t painfully obvious).
Thanks to Beth Spencer and her ‘Human Intelligence Badge‘ post, for the kick in the pants to get off my laptop for a minute and just do something with a pencil and some paper.
I’ve used chatGPT in the past to help generate ideas, which I wrote about last March, about using it like a one person writing room.
However, Sam Altman’s handling of the Scarlett Johansson situation was crap. The ultimate display of the “I can do whatever I want” techbro attitude that disgusts me. And if he can behave that way with one of the biggest movie stars, how does he treat everyone else?
Then recently former head of the NSA Paul M. Nakasone will “join the company’s Sam Altman-led safety team.”
Crumple all of this garbage together with Apple’s recent announcement of their partnership with OpenAI:
“Apple is integrating ChatGPT access into experiences within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, allowing users to access its expertise — as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities — without needing to jump between tools.”
Like, guys… I’m just done with all this shit.
I want to write a blog post, send an email, publish a newsletter once a week, do some work until it’s done, and then hit the trails.
I don’t need more things pulling me to my phone.
I mean, I get it… Apple has to appease shareholders and sell more iPhones. I’m not saying making emojis with cucumbers for eyes isn’t fun.
But it’s not my fun anymore, that’s all.
Fun for me is less computing. Less apps. Fewer low-quality voice interactions with my phone and more real conversations with friends.
So yeah, all this was written with human intelligence, intended for a human audience.
The only thing holding us back from having the internet experience is ourselves.
“Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return.“
This from Molly White, in a piece called ‘We can have a different web.’
We can set up websites for cheap, using a multitude of tools. We can create directories, or field guides, or fan pages for anything we want.
We can link to each others things from our websites, our newsletters, our DMs, our Discords or forums.
It might feel slower, since techbros at social media giants have been feeding you the Kool-Aid that without them you’ll turn to dust, but that just ain’t true.
I’ve been going through so many old photos and images since ditching Apple Photos, and found this from 2013, a screen shot of Twitter, with my Twitter user number as evidence of being one of the first 3,000 to sign up for the service. Un freaking real that I used that service for 17 years.
Since I no longer keep my photos in Apple Photos, I needed a way to transfer my photos from my iPhone to my new file system.
I knew I could plug in my iPhone via USB cable and then use Image Capture to get the photos, but transferring the photos wirelessly would be really nice.
I was looking at USB thumb drives that I could plug into the Lightning port (on the iPhone 14 Plus), export the photos, and then plug into my Mac via the USB C plug.
This seemed fine, except I’d be using SansDisk software. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it looked atrocious.
Not to mention, sure, that’s another $50 purchase.
I then remembered that Dropbox has cloud photo storage. I’ve got the space in my account, and it seems that a month’s worth of photos on my phone is around 5GB of space.
So now, at the end of every month, I can export the images from Dropbox on my Mac and drag them into my new file system.
There is no clunky SansDisk software, no extra purchase, and it all works seamlessly in the background. I did it today for the images, too, and it’s absolutely fine.
