Zach WeinersmithI'm sure there's a tendency to always view the past as better, but the social-media-ification of the Internet has really sucked a lot of the joy out of entertaining people. When it was peripheral to the broader Internet, you spent most of your time making stuff. Now you gotta learn 8 to 12 platforms that mostly want you to act like an employee of their algorithm.
It's bad for consumers too, I think. Reddit has recently gone more in this direction and now I have beloved small reddits that don't pop up on my feed, and meanwhile it's trying to get me to watch videos of people making stupid food recipes, half-true mystery factoids, aliens, personal gossip-sharing, etc. I assume they do this because it works but it's seriously degraded the experience.
How to rebel? That's the question. Personally, I'm leaning into making more depthy more thoughtful stuff. Bea Wolf - longform poetry. A City on Mars - a three-year research project. Oddly, traditional publishing feels like part of the rebellion, because even a bottomline-obsessed publisher still gives a damn about what's in the books and what it says about them. They look bad and feel bad about making trash. Social media breaks that relationship.
Chris White finds this vexing@ZachWeinersmith I’ve seen this in music too: the way to be successful for a lot of musicians is to grind videos on IG/Youtube for other musicians. Solo performances focusing on chops, quick tutorials, funny covers. Some of it’s useful, but it’s overwhelming for people learning and sets up a weird idea that music is all about a feedback loop of leveling up between other musicians. It’s not really music per se.