SOCIAL MEDIA LAST GASPS

This post from Cory Doctorow has pretty much ended it for me:

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

My biggest project is Heavy Metal Email, and I usually hype my recent posts on Twitter with some fancy videos or the cool images I make. Then I’m careful not to include a link, since that’s frowned upon, and I just mention LINK IN BIO.

Well, in the past month, I’ve gotten less than 20 clicks from LinkTree.

And that’s from Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook combined.

So tonight I put out a new GOODNIGHT, METAL FRIEND mix (#32 right here) and I’m not going to promote it all via social media.

I’ve go a newsletter going out to 17 people at 8am tomorrow (subscribe here if you want). So they’ll get to see I have a new mix that I just released.

And I’ve now got 38 or so “followers” on Mixcloud, so those people will get notified of my new mix.

Eh, let’s see where it goes from there, because social media ain’t gonna help a bit!

ACCEPT THE LOVE

Been thinking a lot about Patreon (wrote about it a bit in my latest HEAVY METAL EMAIL), and having been blessed with another paid subscriber this week, this bit from another writer caught my eye:

I have a small group of amazing people who pay for my writings, despite not getting anything extra in return, just to support me. And if you are one of those people: thank you so, so much.

I think Patreon has cursed us with this idea that if we accept support on a monthly basis there must be more. Something extra to shovel on top of the work we’re already doing.

I did this with my Skull Toaster Patreon back in the day. I had one extra for like $10/mo where I’d go to a music shop, buy a used metal CD, and send it to you. I think I called it Mystery Metal or something. It was insane, and a LOT of work, on top of all the other things I was doing, when in fact my main thing was posting 1-3 metal trivia questions PER DAY to social media, and sending out a 200+ word email every night with the answers.

That was a lot.

So I turned on payments with HEAVY METAL EMAIL. I was sending two emails a week anyways.

In those emails I had a section called ANTISOCIAL, which was links to horrible things that the social media platforms keep doing.

But I moved them out of those two emails, and packaged it into a Monday morning email called ANTISOCIAL. Paid subscribers get that.

Not a lot of extra work, and I’m still doing the core thing that I offer – write about how cool email newsletters are, and how social media is horrible (you can subscribe to HEAVY METAL EMAIL here).

Let people support you for what you’re already doing!

NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING

From ‘Forty Years In, Yo La Tengo Are Still Making It Up as They Go‘ over at Pitchfork.

When Yo La Tengo invited Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley to sit in with them for the entirety of their second-night set, the drummer pleaded, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “You don’t have to,” Kaplan told him, adding, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” He only hopes that Yo La Tengo’s faith in their collaborators will spark “something interesting.” 

RAGE AGAINST THE CONTENT

Love this from ‘2022: The Year Music Broke‘ from Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi):

We are in a far worse situation than we were in 1991. Thurston’s part-jokey, part-deadly serious condemnation of the industry then – “When youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do?” – feels like an understatement today. It’s no longer just about youth culture; it’s all cultural production that’s monopolized by big business. Thirty years of capital consolidation have created monopolies larger and more disconnected from “content” than we could have imagined even at our snottiest in the 90s.

I was in the thick of the 2001-2005 music blog frenzy. A good Pitchfork review helped sell thousands of albums, but by 2007 cracks were already starting to appear. Consolidation, the fight for Google search results, social media killing the comments sections, and the push by everyone to get a mention in a blog post drove the value down. CPMs plummeted, it was a race to the bottom and some people won, and lots more lost.

The biggies came in, sold their ads, and when it crashed to the ground, they moved on to other companies with shiny new job titles.

Scorch the earth, destroy the culture, and reap the rewards!

GO GETTERS GONE

The Wall Street Journal says “Bosses all over the U.S. are asking the same question: Where have all the go-getters gone?”

Are you kidding me?

I can’t say it any better than Georgia Garvey here:

That whole thread is a god damned treasure.

BLOGGING LIVES

Saw a link to ‘Bring back personal blogging‘ from Jason Kottke, and his quote struck me:

I mean, absolutely. But…this is also the 78th time I’ve read this exact article since 2007 and I’m beginning to think it’s not going to happen.

I mean, there’s nobody to bring it back, which I think is wonderful. But what’s “not going to happen?”

It’s not like all our friends had their own sites and blogs to begin with. Social media platforms just made it super easy to post photos and write text, and that was fine for a minute.

But then we followed 1284 friends and things got muddy real quick.

New Years Day means the streets are empty and I can take this sort of photo. Unseasonably warm, sorta quiet sort of day. The exhale of the holiday.