Category: InstagramCategory: Instagram

Social media is all smoke and mirrors:

Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) testified that the company has “invested hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two, over the course of my tenure” on creators.

These platforms subsidizing the work of “creators” is the classic “big teddy bear at the carnival” tactics (via Cory Doctorow). Build the illusion by making “successful” contestants, hoping people believe that they can achieve the same thing:

“No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Sure, you can stick around on social media and play the game, and maybe someday you’ll hit the algorithmic lottery, but please don’t let that become your long term strategy. Lottery tickets make horrible retirement plans.

Photographer Marcel Borgstijn is another photographer leaving Instagram:

“A nipple in a fine art photograph violates community standards, but watching someone’s final moments apparently doesn’t. These aren’t community standards; they’re corporate calculations designed to appease advertisers and political actors while maximizing engagement through shock content.”

That’s been happening, but now there’s a new straw that broke the camels back: “Meta found a new way to violate your privacy.”

While we can wait for congress to enact laws to protect consumers (hah!), or wait for a new centralized kingdom of power to rise up and take their place, Marcel has a much better idea, which is “building our own spaces and inviting people to visit on our terms.”

Yes, he admits “it requires more work,” but goes on to say “when you control the platform, you control the experience.”

It all comes down to control. If you build your brand, your business, your entire livlihood on a platform you don’t control, you risk losing everything for almost any reason.

If you pay your web hosting bill, and keep your domain name current, your website will outlast all of the creepy social media platforms.

Who could have seen this coming?

It was July of 2023 when Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said this:

“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”

But now?

“Our intention is to introduce political recommendations in a responsible and personalized way, which means more for people who want this content and less for those who do not.”

Several friends have said they’re glad Threads wasn’t super political, and a nice change of pace from Twitter.

But when your town hall is run by a bunch of money hungry clowns who are desperate to appease the new regime, this is what you get. The “food court” that you thought was still an okay place to hang out was always destined for this outcome.

Get off social media if it makes you feel bad.

If social media is killing your creativity, stealing hours of your day (and night), making your mind race, bringing up feelings of “compare and despair,” making you second-guess your work, stealing joy, robbing you of sleep, leaving you depleted, disrupting your relationships, your work, and your art, then maybe it’s time to develop a social media escape plan.

Is being a shell of yourself worth a few likes or sales?

“I’m deleting most of my social media accounts (some of which I’ve had for over a decade) because I noticed they were repeatedly hurting me. And I was letting them,” writes S. Grohowski

Worry less about being “forgotten,” and envision a future when you re-find yourself.

“After two months away from (social media), I feel much less distracted and more grounded, present, and focused on what matters most.,” writes Ashley Neese

Trust that the universe will help you get your work in front of the right people without making dance videos or keeping up with the latest trending audio.

“How much hustle do you have to put in before you decide it isn’t worth the grind? There comes a point in every phase of business when you realize that some things simply don’t work—for us, our businesses, and our mental health,” writes 

Jamie R Cox in ‘Am I The Girl Who Deleted Instagram?’

You’re reading this right now, aren’t you? How could that happen if I didn’t post about it on social media?

One of my favorite albums of the last year was introduced to me from an old friend via email.

I wrote about the anniversary of the passing of an old friend in NYC. Their former neighbor found my blog post when they Googled their name. Read that again, friend – they found my blog post. From a search engine. In 2024.

“Lately I’ve been considering leaving (social media) and not looking back, and calling it what it is—an addiction (that’s probably the hardest part as someone who struggles with addiction). It literally adds nothing to my life, other than fleeting moments of “connection” with friends who probably wouldn’t contact me if it weren’t for the 30 second reels,” writes 

Kaitlyn Ramsay

If you don’t want to go to networking events, or play shows in noisy bars, or set up at busy markets, or start a YouTube channel or a podcast, then don’t. Just because other folks are doing it, doesn’t mean you have to follow their lead.

Set your own path, make your own luck, and if social media makes you sick, start dreaming of a life without it.

I’ve been talking to a lot of you about setting up newsletters, and the biggest challenge seems always to be, “How do I get my followers on Instagram to subscribe to my Substack?”

I’ve said before that social media is like the food court at the mall.

When you set up shop at the mall, yes, you’ll have lots of foot traffic, but you’re also bound by the rules of the mall – opening hours, delivery schedules, branding, etc.

But look at you – your food stand built quite a following and you expanded.

You set up shop in a nice downtown space – you set the hours, the vibes, the branding, and the music that plays while serving your customers.

Now, as a business owner like that, how much time will you spend at the mall?

Sure, some of your old customers are there, but you’ve probably got a handful of customers coming into your shop daily, right?

You could return to the food court and hand out some flyers – “Hey, visit us downtown!”

But… you’ve got a business to run. You’ve got customers!

So, to get away from the restaurant analogy – you’ve got an email list. You might have 25 people on your list. You might have 250, 1000, or 5000.

Sure, many people clicked FOLLOW on Instagram, but how much effort are you willing to invest to get them to your website?

People downloaded Instagram to be on Instagram.

Yes, we discover people, brands, art, and music from Instagram, but many of us haven’t bookmarked every website or subscribed to every email list (most folks on Instagram don’t even have email lists).

If you genuinely want to escape social media, the best course of action is to make some “WE MOVED” signs and schedule them for your various social media platforms.

Or, you could do what I did this past week and post twice on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Let’s see how that worked out.

I got 320 views total on LinkedIn (two posts), and 222 views on Instagram.

As you can see above, from my 542 views I got 14 people (users) to visit Social Media Escape Club, which is a 2.5% conversion rate.

But I fought for those clicks – I DM’d almost everyone who LIKED the IG stories, and gave them a link to the post I was promoting.

The result: two new subscribers (and one upgraded to a paid subscription).

It’s like I say, the vault is still open.

We can go back to the food court as often as we want, but we can only snag people a few people each time to visit.

Your results will vary, since I write about newsletters, and you probably do something a lot cooler than what I’m doing.

So maybe you get 4-6 new subscribers a week doing all that?

Do that for three months, and you might have 60 new subscribers.

Mind you, this is just one of the many ways to get the attention of your followers on a social media platform.

You can make dance videos and point at words and use trending audio…

Or you can make the best damn content for your existing subscribers.

Update your website. Send a weekly newsletter.

And avoid the mall this weekend if you can.

Happy Holidays, friends.