Category: CommunityCategory: Community

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.

From JA Westenberg’s “Communities are not fungible” piece,

“When a platform dies or degrades, its community does not simply migrate to the next platform, it fragments, and the ones who do arrive at the new place find that the social dynamics are different, the norms have shifted, and a substantial number of the people who made the old place feel like home are gone.”

This is what makes the “how do I move my social media followers to my newsletter?” a seemingly impossible task.

There are people that work at Meta who have multiple vacation homes because they are very good at their job, which is to keep users on their platform.

Make it addictive enough to keep people from leaving, and charge for things that used to be free, and you’ve got yourself a nice career.

Communities are not resources to be optimised and they’re not user bases to be migrated. They’re the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and over again, to remain in a relationship with each other under specific conditions that will never, ever recur in exactly the same way.

Some of your followers on Instagram are never going to subscribe to your newsletter.

Everyday, one of your followers logs into the platform for the last time.

Your followers are not yours, they are owned by the platforms who profit from your years of shouting “follow me on social media for updates!”

Making a living (or at least paying the rent) with a small, engaged email list is possible, even as people with massive social followings struggle to pay their phone bill.

As someone shared in our recent “BREAK UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” Zoom call, a big social media following might look good (as in, vanity metrics), but “getting more followers” isn’t the answer, but rather making sure the thing you’re offering is something people actually want to pay for.

Are you tired of working alone, shaking your fist at the internet in isolation?

MrBeast would spend 12+ hours a day on Skype talking with fellow YouTubers when he started out, hell bent on cracking the YouTube algorithm.

Those are two extremes, (isolation vs 12+ hour Skype calls) with plenty of room in between.

When you hear someone else doing something creative in a group setting, like painting, letter writing, or practicing their instruments, it gives you permission to start something similar for yourself, with people in your own creative orbit.

Hearing people talking about these gatherings on a Zoom call, or in person, is powerful, because you can hear the joy in their voice, and see it in their eyes. This is different than just reading about it, because you get to witness the energy in real time.