I Deleted All of My Social Media and 60,000 Followers
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
On topic: I've experienced exactly what he's talking about in the field of indie game development. The entire gamedev industry is on Twitter. It was an endless treadmill of validation seeking for me. At first it's screaming into the void, then it's strategically following and unfollowing people, then eventually it's one mega tweet that gets retweeted by your childhood hero or one of the cool indie illuminati kids. It's never enough and you're never happy.
There's a super indie hip event in LA called IndieCade that I've probably spent $250 in application fees over the years trying to get my game into. I was devastated every time I got rejected. A couple months ago I got tickets for free, and coming from a fresh perspective outside the industry, it was shockingly underwhelming. There was a dad with 13-year-old daughters showing off a painfully amateur interactive fiction they wrote as a family. I couldn't believe THIS was the thing I had cared about so much.
Whatever industry bubble you're in... it's not that important and no one outside the bubble cares. And when I realized that, it felt like a huge burden lifted. :)
I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that Twitter definitely puts us into an industry bubble, where the same ideas are repeated over and over in the echo chamber.
When you are inside the echo chamber, it is extremely difficult to realize how little significance those people have outside that bubble. Sometimes it is good to take a step back and look at all of this from an outsider's perspective.
If you want to make games, really what you need to actually do is make a game and don't stop until it's done, and wrap yourself up in your customers, not other game developers.
It is a huge difference from the “learning to program/programming” communities. Those groups can also foster their own feelings of self-lack, but not on the scale of cyber.
> The use of smaller populations result in lower accuracy of the solution, obtained for a smaller computational time. The further increase of the population size increases the accuracy of solution. This effect is observed to a population size of 100 chromosomes. The use of larger populations does not improve the solution accuracy and only increase the needed computational resources.
The same effect may be what this article is describing, applied to culture. As the audience grows, the neural resources applied to judgement grow, but after a point the accuracy does not. A larger population does not translate into a more thorough search of the solution space compared to the same population divided into smaller niches that do not communicate.
I doubt it would be a great improvement to divide the population back down to the tiny tribes of prehistory, but the optimum is likely somewhere between that and our global melting pot.
Inclusion is a modern creed and battle cry, but to a point exclusion also has its place in increasing innovation, in that it creates independent niches that each attempt to climb different maxima.
Here's a different view:
"Small Populations over Many Generations can beat Large Populations over Few Generations in Genetic Programming"[1]
The results of AI research is often very problem-dependent, as there are so many variables that vary between problems, and many ways to tweak the algorithms themselves. They're also often not reproduceable. So I take their claims with a huge grain of salt.
[1] - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.7...
As someone who barely uses social media, I don't really understand what someone means when they "communicate" with 60,000 people. I envision a guy standing on the concert stage with a megaphone and 60,000 below him.
60000 followers.
No word about losing business. Or interesting discussions. Or inspiration. Or meeting likeminded people. Or getting feedback. Or anything.
I think many people come to this conclusion over time. That the number of social media followers is just a number. With little to no real world impact.
I think Twitter even less so.
Facebook might be convenient for people to message them? But even then, I imagine it's mostly over email.
I think there's a pretty big illusion that social media sites add tons of value to a lot of small mom-and-pop businesses. A good website, email, and word of mouth, and in-person contacts, is likely more effective...
Everyone should beware of small, frivolous activities that keep us from achieving our life goals. And it seems Twitter is almost uniquely destructive in this regard. Not quite as bad as meth, but not a whole lot better either. And social media, in general, sucks up too much time, for too many people.
If you want to do something great with your life, be careful how you spend your time. If you'd like to create a great game, or a write a great novel, you need to focus on that. Don't waste your energy on Twitter.
While I am not rich, my businesses is growing really well and I feel confident that we will reach my goals for the company in the next year or two.
And all of this without almost any presence digitally.
We have a website that is actually more extensive than most tutoring/test prep companies our size (I did some freelance Wordpress stuff), we get almost no business from it.
I tried doing some Facebook ads a while ago, but it just seemed like more work than it was worth. It's better for me to focus on making sure my students get their scores than to drum up business from spending money on Facebook or whatever other social media.
I feel like getting business through Facebook or Google or Instagram would just take way too much effort, time, energy and money for me.
I would rather keep improving my test prep courses than do that.
And if you get students the scores they need, not only will it change their lives, they will give your name and number out to everyone they know.
If you care about and are trying to improve your number of followers, you clearly haven’t made it. If you’ve made it, you don’t need followers. You probably won’t even have a social media account at all.
Trying to figure out which connections matter and how to get them is always a challenge. I'm always bemused by pieces like this because it describes a way of relating that is alien to me.
My experiences on Twitter have been overall pretty positive. I don't have a lot of followers. I'm still working out how to interact constructively with the space. But I fundamentally don't do social media the way so many authors of pieces like this describe doing it. I imagine that's somehow pertinent.
That makes sense. I've heard a lot of film makers and authors who don't really watch movies or read others books so that they voice will be unaffected and stay unique.
I dunno, there is some interesting and innovative work being posted to the likes of Instagram, etc, you just don't see it so much in the explore feed or hear about it outside of the fine art photographic circles because it's not the kind of work that attracts tens of thousands of followers.
The original post, somewhat ironically cross-posted to the largest photographic news and blog post aggregator on the web today, seems to be more a case of redefining success at a tangent to what social media defines as success. There are plenty of photographers making a good steady living doing what they do without worrying about follower count, likes, or getting on the content treadmill. Arguably they have found success within their photographic niche.
If you're really trying to make it as a photographer you're probably concentrating more on calls for work, portfolio reviews, attending seminars/retreats, building a body of work, networking with those in the art world who can get your work in front of the "right" people, personal projects, long term ideas, and so on. Social media won't help you achieve those things.
It seems that the author had the revelation that success on social media (from a photographic point of view) is more an indication of how good you are at marketing yourself and not necessarily how good you are[1] as a photographer. Another example is YouTube, there are dozens of very popular photography channels run by photographers that produce mediocre, uninteresting work. That's not a bad thing, per se, but if it redefines what "success" is as a photographer to those who go purely by follower counts, etc then, well, who knows?
An analogy would be Red Bull: a hugely successful marketing company that happens to also produce really awful soft drinks.
I should probably turn this into a blog post...
[1] Beyond the realms of the boring technicalities i should say. There are countless photographers creating technically excellent, beautifully composed, utterly mundane work.
This is the real definition of success in my opinion. A few years in, pleasing composition and technical prowess is not exactly hard anymore. To create something with meaning, or a real story behind it, that's the meat of photography. I'm at this point now, and I hate it. I'm creating beautiful photos of nothing. I think the author is seeing this too however. Social media encourages you to make frequent, beautiful compositions that fit your brand or style, and that often compromises the soul of your work. If you're thinking about how your photo will fit on your feed, then you're victim of this anti-creative pattern of thinking, if your intention is to create meaningful, personal work.
As you point out, social media rewards what people want to hear/see, not whatever it is you have to say. Mastery of craft should serve articulating the message, and the message must come from within, not serve someone else’s utility function.
I also have a custom motorcycle shop and instagram/facebook are super important for marketing reasons. We try to build an audience because people will order a custom bike if they like previous work. Also I follow other builders on these platforms to see what they are building.
I got into building custom motorcycles by my love for them. By getting inspired by seeing what other builders are doing. Thanks to instagram I'm no longer dependent on buying magazines and seeing what they put into it. Now I can follow obscure builders and have a wider range of influences. By doing and sometimes by copying you get better at the craft and in time you will find your own voice.
No, it's a tool, a channel to reach your audience.
> If I create something beautiful — something I am immensely proud of — do I need to share it on social media? Do I need others to affirm it?
This is strange, social media share are for traffic and engagement to drive ad revenue. If done for affirmation, then it's probably not the best thing to do.