SCALE AT THE RISK OF YOUR SANITY

Yancey Strickler posted on Twitter. His idea went semi-viral, and then the trolls chimed in.

“Scale doesn’t just amplify the signal you want. It hands a megaphone to everyone else too. My presence on public channels gave strangers the license to try to wreck my work and ego for sport.”

The idea of “getting word out” sounds so pure and good, but sometimes enduring the negative effects make it not worth the trouble.

I don’t walk into marketing meetings and tell people social media is stupid.
I don’t want to “win a debate.”
My ideals don’t require a dissertation defense.

This is why I rarely post on Substack Notes anymore, as suddenly I’m required to defend any statement and make accommodations for any angle I didn’t address in my original post.

I’d rather write a newsletter to people who subscribed to it.
I’d rather write a blog for people who bother to visit.
I’d rather present ideas with my member community.

These are my safe spaces. Life is hard enough, I’d rather not turn Social Media Escape Club into a hard-mode fighting game. I’m allowed to seek comfort and quiet, and so are you.

As Yancey says:

“What I’m left with: a desire to unscale. To be in spaces where ideas can be heard and developed without the rage brigades trying to inflict pain just to feel something. We’ve been taught to see scale as the whole point of being online — a delusional VC logic we’ve accepted as the cost of participation. We shouldn’t. Our attention and energy are too scarce for it.”

I save time and energy by not being on the social media platforms, by not having comments on this blog. I might lose in the “reaching new people” game, but I’d rather keep my sanity as a daily win.