It's time to get away from social networks

As you know, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter sparked strong reactions in the community. Some people decided to move to Mastodon where some stayed on board primilarly because of their established audience; which was also my case. I wasn't ready to put my energy into building a new account elsewhere.

After watching people react to the news and the trend of switching to Mastodon, I realized how badly things were going.

Twitter algorithms and visibility

I've always struggled to get visibility on Twitter, but it's gotten worse over the past months. With 100+ followers, I only get 10-30 impressions when I tweet without tags. It means that even people who have decided to follow me barely see my content in their feed. Also, I don't have conversations anymore (less engagement) and people don't click on anything I share since it takes them off Twitter.

Even my timeline is poorly done. It's simple, when you follow popular accounts (e.g Elon Musk...) you see each of their posts and even receive notifications about them. However, moderately active or low-follower accounts will not appear in your feed. They have no voice. The only workaround I found was to turn on notifications for some of the accounts I follow to make sure I get their posts. But I don't think it's something people do naturally, and for good reason it shouldn't be the nominal behaviour.

Twitter controls your reach and may even worsen it by changing the algorithms. You depend on the platform, that's where your audience is and maybe even your income. It's the same for all social networks. The content and the effort you put into it are at risk because you don't own it.

Bullshit recommendations to grow your audience

When you want to start a business or a community, you do your research on marketing and communication. This is where you start reading those bullshit recommendations on how to grow your audience. The worst? That works. And that's why I consider it morally wrong, it's playing the game of the algorithms that reinforce unhealthy behaviours and unethical features on these platforms. Don't get me wrong, it's very easy to be caught up in this race for visibility, no matter the ways (Hey me!). Doesn't being a "Growth Hacker" justify your actions anyway?

A few general recommendations I've seen being followed:

• Post daily to keep your account active for algorithms (i.e force yourself to post something, even if it's crap).
• Engage in conversations regularly (i.e pretend to be interested in others and various topics).
• Write about political topics or trends (i.e you have an opinion on everything).
• Use numbers in your headlines, specifically odd ones because it retains users' attention (i.e psychological manipulation and it's just a simple example).

And it's not only true for social networks. Take a look at communities like dev.to or indiehackers.com. You will have a tone of clickbait headlines on the same popular topics (like chatGPT), just to reach the popular sections and get more followers. This leads to copying existing content without really caring about the topic and without providing any real value. A waste of time for the writer as well as for the readers.

Did I mention LinkedIn? It makes me nauseous. All these brave people forced to invent a life, advocating storytelling as the only way to communicate. And because it makes numbers, you should attach a photo of yourself, especially a selfie, and please smile. But unfortunately it really works. Because everyone imitates everyone else, we end up with a normalization of behaviour without any apparent authority figure forcing us to do so. Not apparent because in reality the algorithms dicatate these behaviours. And who writes the algorithms?

Social networks collapse?

I think we're losing real quality content, real communities and people who are genuinely interested in other people and specific topics. We now live in a superficial Internet where people interact mostly for their own sake and in search of validation. We end up creating echo chambers. Have we reached the collapse of social networks?

And so?

So I stay as far away as possible from social networks. The only exception will be YouTube, as I don't feel ready to move any of my channels yet. But I don't rule out switching to Vimeo (already tried) or PeerTube later. From time to time I will share a link on some platforms to help with discovery and meet new people, but that's it.

I realized that I was putting so much energy in social media that I wasn't caring enough about my websites. I slowly started to realize this by visiting Mu-An Chiou's blog : RSS, blog roll, stories, photos, everything on her blog? Oh... why not me? I want to dedicate my time to creating a unique place that belongs to me with original content.

I already made an announcement on Twitter for each of my accounts and of course hardly anyone saw them. And it's ok! Just like this blog which will remain largely unknown, except perhaps for few articles making their way through natural referencing and word of mouth. I want to put effort into creating cool stuff here, like improving content organization, sharing more thoughts and knowledge.

What I wish I had said to myself before? The good news is that you're not exceptional. You are not better than anyone, just as no one is better than you. You're just you, and that's fine.