Podcast Episode 1: Threads, Mastodon, and the Loneliness of Social Media
Thoughts on Meta's Threads and how the debate about social media is not about tech or the internet at all.
About This Episode
Meta’s new social media app Threads mostly let people export their pre-existing following. Here’s why I think that’s a problem.
Excerpt
The size of your following is often correlated to your power outside that platform (most big accounts are celebrities, billionaires, journalists, or media personalities for a reason). And the amount of effort that you need to invest into your posts is inversely proportional to your following size.
If you’re small, you will only get noticed by making really great content and having some luck with the algorithm. If you’re big, you can kind of get away with posting mediocre garbage. Simply thanks to exposure to so many people, your posts are much more likely to get surfaced via any algorithm. And then the cycle continues.
But here’s the beauty of the internet: because so many of us would end up posting on the same platforms as those celebrities and big personalities… sometimes we’d have a shot. Over the years on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, what-have-you – occasionally some regular person would strike gold and get that algorithmic blessing. They’d pop off with one viral post or continue compounding on previous momentum to grow big. It’s a digital rags-to-riches story, one of the last remaining frontiers of the increasingly impossible American Dream.
So, what happens to that dream of digital meritocracy when a brand-new social media platform is launched with those old hierarchies firmly rooted in place?
About This Podcast
This is the first ever audio version of ADMD!
I will be making my way through the entire backlog of newsletter posts, but we are starting off with the most recent essay I’ve published:
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Self-Promotional Aside
Hi, if you’re curious to learn more about earning attention and distribution for your content without having to depend on the whims of any particular social media platform or its algorithms… I’m co-hosting a webinar on exactly that topic next week!
Join me and two of my marketing friends on Thursday, July 20 at 1:00 PM — 2:00 PM EDT for a free webinar that’s all about finding content distribution opportunities by building strategic relationships with others.
