Category: sethwCategory: sethw

Great line from Skyr0 at about the 1:20 mark:

“Social media just completely broke me, rewired my brain, and changed me for the worse. I’ve had multiple times of burnout, and I guess that’s kind of just the nature of short-form content. But honestly, at this point, I feel like my future fans—wherever they are—they aren’t on these apps, and it’s just not the place to be anymore for me.”

It’s possible your future fans aren’t on social media.

The deal with a blog is simple. You show up, and the author says “here’s where we’re starting today.”

You open Instagram, the algorithm says “here’s where we’re starting today.”

Many modern websites say “you decide.”

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

A disciplined menu structure doesn’t limit user choice, it increases it.

Where are we starting today?

If you want someone to sign up for your newsletter, give them a link where they can do just that.

This is what The New Happy Newsletter does very well.

Remove all distractions, eliminate the noise, and build your email sign up page to do one thing – get someone to sign up for your newsletter.

Let people see what they’re signing up for. Let them click around and get a feel. People don’t give up their email address easily, so make a good case.

This from The Creative Rebel podcast with Stephanie Harrison – listen here.

Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball taking aim at Google for killing the GOOG.GL shortlink:

 “I trust Google with almost nothing long-term. Mark my words, they’re going to do this with Gmail accounts eventually.”

Hey, nobody uses email anymore, right?

From “Death of the IG Party Flyer” over at NINA:

“Semi-secret shows and anti-Instagram promotional strategies hold obvious appeal for audiences who want to be in on something, so how under-the-radar can these projects stay? And if the Wedding Planners do manage to stay relatively offline, can they stay afloat in a scene that is as expensive and competitive as New York? For now, they seem unconcerned with that, focusing on building community and giving musicians a place to play.”

There is allure in belonging to something small, to something that not everybody knows about. Social media got us grasping for more instead of focusing on living in the moment.

Don’t forget – we had a good thing going with music blogs in the early 2000s, before the techbros and investor hawks swooped in and bled it dry. The CPMs couldn’t keep up, so they built up the social media racket, which – if you love tragedy, hate, AI slop, and worse – well then, you’ll love it. And it’s ready to implode. Maybe not “Facebook closes up shop” implode, but enough so that the culture makers and curators and artists abandon ship.

History repeats itself, which is why if you have a foundation of creative friends, enthusiastic weirdos, and vibrant beings you’ll be just fine.