I took a photography class from this guy! Ohio represent!
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.
I belonged to an indie game community where the only people making money were the ones making development tools and selling it to the community.
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.
I agree with you. The biggest challenge I have is wrapping myself up with my customers. I have no idea how to go about doing that. Any ideas? Resources? Tips?
The cybersecurity community is very similar to your description. Add in a small dash of actual spying and espionage that makes everyone paranoid over what everyone knows / has and it can be very unhealthy.
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.
I second what you said. People want to call those in infosec paranoid, but there is also the very real risk of spying or theft or intellectual property that one can never let their guard down. It's not paranoid if it's true! This mentality is very tiring to keep up with but if you don't, you can lose badly.
Here's [0] the conclusion of a paper on optimizing population sizes in genetic algorithms:
> 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.
"The use of smaller populations result in lower accuracy of the solution, obtained for a smaller computational time."
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.
Groups of primates grow up to only a certain rough number, depending on the species. After that communication problems, jealousies, etc, prevent the ones on top of the pack from being able to manage the situation.
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.
I think there are more caveats than meet the eye. For example innovation on something massive like the nuke or original space flight took tens of thousands of people. But finding the best form on a phone is trivial enough that you need only a couple engineers designing but having many models around the world would be ideal for finding the best.
What I find interesting is what he says he loses by doing so.
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.
Sometimes you don't know what you have until it's gone. The number of followers alone doesn't matter, the quality of them does. If this was 60,000 connections in the market of his business, he has done himself some egregious harm. I'm a limited data point, but I did notice that when I left Facebook, some people took it personally. Especially the ones I interacted with often. Imagine someone liking all your posts, then you announce that you are leaving the platform. What does it say to them? Do you not want to connect with them anymore? Maybe there is a type of social media black sheep effect as well.
I'd be curious if Instagram is actually a lead gen for a photography business? Or many small businesses. Might be a quick way to maybe see what someone's posted as a portfolio, but i'm pretty sure more people would just go to the artists website to see their actual portfolio work.
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...
I'm looking at tattoo artists and judging them on their Instagram photos. There's a few things like this I would check social media for, but mostly I'm looking at reputation (reviews and writeups) rather than photos and other social presence.
There are a lot of ways to generate leads for business, and general social media shares into the ether do not tend to compare favorably to other channels. If social media is annoying or makes you contort your message, you can almost certainly just use another channel that is less annoying to reach people.
The energy that goes into writing tweets is also energy that could instead go into works of lasting value. I've noticed that with all of my favorite writers, the moment when they turn to Twitter seems to be a moment when their production of high quality books/essays seems to go into decline. One of my favorite economists had a 10 year streak when he was absolutely on fire, then he started tweeting on Twitter, and his production of books and essays almost vanished. When it comes to fiction writers, I could also put J K Rowling into this category.
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.
Yup, very true for small businesses. I get almost 100% of my clients through client referrals (I own a test prep company).
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.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only thing cooler (in this age) than having millions of followers is not needing any followers.
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.
If you've made it, whatever that means, you probably have a large rolodex of connections and/or clients, an industry-wide reputation, a widely read blog, a large newsletter, a large social media audience, or something else to that effect. In every single case it's about followers in some form or another.
And yet he blogged about it and the blog has share buttons.
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.
So social media is good for marketing, but bad for true creatives trying to be innovative.
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.
> So social media is good for marketing, but bad for true creatives trying to be innovative.
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.
>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.
Certainly you have something to say photographically. Keep seeking. Recall that the big names are all remembered for a tiny fraction of their work. Ansel Adams is remembered for approximately 40 photographs, out of a lifetime of art images and countless advertising photos from his commercial business that paid the bills. Weston, Eisenstadt, Cartier-Bresson, Karsh, we remember them for a fraction of their output.
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.
As an ex Agile Coach (currently back doing real work as tech lead) I used twitter a lot. Could learn from people in my bubble and maybe teach other. For the moment not working Agile anymore as most of the people I met on conferences and on twitter are toxic. I cut down on the people I follow on twitter drastically. Now just follow some people for fun and not too much for work.
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 social media account or agent or client is going to be your savior.
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.
This seems like the post of someone who makes flip assessments of people from limited data points, then announce those assessments to rooms of people who could not care less about your assessments.
Your executive brain can only track so many things. It’s primary purpose is to filter out the noise of all the many inputs from the rest of your brain and allow you to focus on the one most important thing happening right now.
By contrast, your subconscious produces vast quantities of predictions, most of which are necessarily discarded as junk or inactionable long before they reach your conscious brain.
It sounded to me like the author had gained over a decade of experience of the business expense/benefit associated with social media, and in conversation with others, was able to reveal to themselves what they already knew to be true: they were not benefiting from their social media presence, and that it was actively subverting their dopamine circuits towards “likes” over “purchases.” Instead, they benefited primarily from personal relationships formed in other mediums, and spending time on social media was a distraction to, not a building block of, their business.
I suppose you believe advertising doesn't work and the billions spent on it are unjustified?
Look at how brains work. Stimulus response. Reward pathways. Millions of years of biology and chemistry.
Or just read a book on positive dog training. I recommend "Total Recall" by Pippa Mattison as it explains how tiny little reward lead to behaviour that is utterly fixed no matter what distractions come along. ('The power of habit' by Charles Duhigg is the equivalent book for humans)
Lol, I like how you just wildly overgeneralized what I said. Addiction to social media when you are using it to promote your business is a lack of discipline. Also, you sound like a meme machine. Yes we can clearly become addicted to things, but we can exercise control over ourselves. If you want to be successful, I suggest you stop memeing about reward pathways and millions of years of biology and chemistry. Control yourself. Stop swiping the feeds, stop putting that shit into your mouth, etc. Pick up a martial art if you want to learn discipline.
Is your dog managing your social media or something? You have me cracking up with your focus on dog training. By your reasoning everyone is walking around addicted to everything. Granted, the weak do fall into this trap; however, did you know there are people endowed with a magical capacity called will power that just use these sites for their basic function and leave, not spend all day occupied with it. We aren't dogs man. Please don't use your dog training wisdom to justify your addictions to things, if that's what you are doing. You can rise above that. You can be aware of things that make you addicted and resist the temptation. You are a being capable of self reflection, you can think about your own thoughts. You can see what is dragging you down. Rise above and look into yourself. Break your collar and join the human race.
Last year I deleted my blog's Instagram account (20,000 followers) and still have no regrets. Since then I've also deleted my personal Instagram account and my blog's Twitter account (7,000 followers). Still no regrets. The only thing I'm keeping is my personal newsletter list.
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. :)