I was listening to a YouTube video by Taylor Lorenz called Nobody wants to post anymore!! Taylor had a discussion with Kyle Chayka, a writer at The New Yorker, about his piece on the subject of the death of casual posting on social media. I believe that it’s from his article titled Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui? (I read the wrong article initially and was then locked out of reading this article due to not being a New Yorker subscriber. Welcome to the brave new world of subscriptions!) Anyway, you can watch Taylor’s video here.
As I was listening to their discussion I kept nodding my head and verbally responding with the phrases “Uh huh,” and “Yep,” and “I feel the exact the same way!” It has been a slow process, but I have been increasingly feeling this phenomenon for a while. As more dystopian events happen in our society, and around the world, my desire to post on social media, including YouTube, has decreased significantly. I am starting to make more of my YouTube videos private, and I am considering posting only on my blog from this point on. I probably won’t have any readers, but at least I still have a creative outlet for my ideas. Below are some ideas from their discussion that resonated with me.
- I’m becoming apathetic about posting online, and am even starting to feel an aversion to putting my creations out in the ether.
- I feel alienated from the current social media feeds. I don’t know what the new rules are for engaging posts. They consistently change.
- Social media has become more politicized.
- I’m becoming more particular about my online privacy and am working toward decreasing my digital footprint.
- It’s embarrassing to create something and then receive no engagement. You ask yourself, “Why did I even post this?”
- Algorithmic feeds disconnect you from your audience. Before the algorithmic era you kind of knew who you were talking to on the internet. The gamble of algorithmic social media is that you don’t know who you’re reaching and you also don’t know who you’re consuming.
- I feel unsafe throwing out a random thought and/or I don’t know how my followers will interpret my content.
- Your content is suddenly mashed in between increasingly inflammatory content, engagement bait, and horrific news. I feel awkward sharing my benign content when the internet is full of atrocities. Our world is so miserable that my content seems trivial. There’s no separation between the trivial and the horrific. It feels bad to put your own random content next to those posts.
- There is no safe space away from that except your own newsletter or your own blog. But the audience hasn’t exited the mass spaces. Therefore, as a creator you’re stuck between getting ignored and doing your own thing for a tiny crowd, or getting swept away in this massive tide of slop and garbage. Neither option is appealing.
- There is the professionalization of social media. You feel the pressure of increased production quality. The standard of what is a good post gets higher and higher. There’s more hoops to jump through and more boxes to check to even put something out in the ether.
- We’re now supposed to replicate the dynamics of more traditional media.
- There is this new hellish environment in which we all have to look perfect and act perfect and comply with algorithmic aesthetics.
- Sharing our lives online and making ourselves public exposes us to judgement. And in today’s world that can be dangerous.
