Category: TechnologyCategory: Technology

In a recent Email Guidance session, someone told me about spending too much time on social media promoting their podcast.

Promoting our work on social media leads to likes and replying to comments and responding to DMs.

Thus, our marketing efforts on social media lead to more work on social media; we keep feeding the machine, and the machine gives you more busy work.

Eventually our work suffers because we’re also cos-playing as a social media manager.

Instagram and Facebook love all the time that we devote to promoting our work, all while we’re spending less time doing the work. We’re on their platforms engaging and interacting in the hopes of getting more likes, views, impressions. Pull the lever, win a prize!

But the prize we’re looking for rarely comes. We’re hoping for the click, which could lead to the subscribe. We engage, we like, we spend another 20 minutes interacting, hoping for the elusive click.

Let’s stop hoping and realize the truth: RSS exists.

Podcast players pull in new episodes via an RSS feed, and “feed readers” like NetNewsWire (my favorite) let us subscribe to blogs (even Substack newsletters and YouTube videos).

So when we publish a new piece, people get it without interference from algorithms, spam folders, or promotions tabs.

And if we devote time to making great work instead of feeding social media platforms, it would seem that our work could grow by delivering it directly to the people who care.

More on RSS:
“In defense of RSS” by Seth Godin

“The ancient technology of the RSS feed” by TK (YouTube short)

Lots of well paid people sit in meetings all day plotting new ways to keep us exhausted and tied to the idea that without social media we’re nothing. Their livelihood (and two summer homes) depend on you making another post, using another hashtag, editing another vertical video.

They want you lugging a mic stand into the woods instead of playing a gig on a Tuesday night.

If you’re not spending time on their platform, why would they help you promote your gig? That’s why they want your “native uploads.” You’re rewarded with likes and “views” from people you don’t know, can’t meet, and maybe don’t even exist.

On a morning walk this week, I saw a university work truck holding up traffic while the driver got out to pick up a paper cup that someone threw on the sidewalk. Sometimes the tools we use can be overkill. What gigantic tools are you using that could you stop using today and still get the job done?

Rigid publishing schedules and timelines are the teachings of the techbro industrial complex, the unholy trinity of The Data, The Device, and The Distraction.

Social media was a job we never signed up for, a part time gig to appease the algorithm. Displease the platform and you’ll be banished from the feed.

Yet I talk to many creative people who’ve stepped away from the social media circus and they’re doing fine. People who’ve left tech jobs and done okay. People who’ve left the hustle Olympics and realized there is life outside the algorithm.

As Erin Shetron said, daring to “(imagine) what devotion to craft can look like outside of platform demands.”

Instead of getting more subscribers, what if we focus on getting better?

Without a map, “better” becomes difficult to find. Without external validation or “engagement,” we’re off the hook – who can blame you for throwing in the towel?

But like my buddy Sean Cannon said on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.”

This doesn’t mean you have it all figured out, it just means you have the chance to figure it out because you didn’t burn out and give up.

I didn’t leave social media because I listened to the OFF THE GRID podcast and Amelia Hruby, PHD told me step by step how to delete my accounts, or give me steps 1-10 how I’d find work if I don’t have a LinkedIn account.

I left the social media platforms because Amelia showed that it was possible.

Artist Edgar Fabián Frías, from a recent Off The Grid episode:

“It happened because she showed that it was possible.  It’s like we’re all starting to reorient and move in a different direction. And of course it’s gonna take, you know, a lot of different shapes and forms.

But I am just so excited to see like how we start to innovate, ’cause we’re all so creative and, and you know, there’s so many geniuses in our networks that I’m thrilled to see what happens when we start to kind of put our energy in this direction.”

If there’s a map, there’d be no magic to it because it takes away the tension. When there’s no tension, it’s just color by numbers, something to follow, and if it doesn’t work out, you can point your finger and say, “see? I knew it wouldn’t work.”

A new way is possible, and it’s gonna require some work, magic, and community to figure it all out.

We’ll find the new way together, when dipping our feet into a creek, or during the conversation on a long drive home after a show.

Amelia Hruby, PHD is a guest on next week’s Escape Pod Zoom call.