Against Likes and Subscribers
On a long enough timeline, everything on the internet transforms into ‘social media’.
Social media is all about metrics. To be social online, to prove one is social online, is to acquire likes, subscribers, notes, replies, comments, and retweets/stacks.
Ergo, soon enough, everything on the internet transforms into an agent of progress and aggrandizement, wherein the primary—albeit somewhat tacit—purpose of any undertaking is to grow, acquire, or accumulate.
There is nothing wrong with someone wanting their work to be read or heard, of course. But an artist or writer wanting their work to be seen is vastly different from the artist in question creating something for the purpose of it being seen.
The aforementioned, aggrandizing form of the internet is parasitic. If a communal, networked site currently doesn’t have some form of likes, subs, or engagement metrics, you can rest assured that in time, it will. These new engagement metrics will, equally in time, infect the users of said site. The infection in question will transform the user’s (creators') brains into ‘content’ machines, wherein they will no longer create for the sake of art or writing, but for the sake of clicks, likes, and subscribers.
The issue is that the ‘content’ which accrues the most engagement is that which is the most universal, homogenous, safe, accepted, and tolerated. This is to say that any site that includes some form of engagement metric will, eventually, cater primarily to the lowest common denominator.
The best, current example of this is Substack. A site that originally began as a service focused on both showcasing and protecting all forms of writing has quickly transformed into just another run-of-the-mill slop machine, complete with low-effort image/meme posts, video snippets, and AI garbage. It is now, speaking in terms of culture, useless. Substack is dead, long live…websites?
So, I’ve moved back here, to a website. It’s built on Bearblog, the ethos and attitude of which seems perfectly fine to me. Self-hosting was an option, but why spend all that time mucking around just for clout? There’s words on the screen, read them or don’t.
It’s easy to ‘argue’ for likes and subscribers if one believes that popularity is equal to quality. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes it isn’t. So, really, what engagement metrics do is induce laziness. They act as a confusing, haphazard filter that is at best meaningless, and at worst, obfuscating and apathetic.
I’m against them. I’m against engagement metrics. I say this as someone with a world-renowned podcast. Someone who has experienced both ends (bad book reviews and 100,000s of listeners) of the spectrum. They do nothing to bolster creativity and do everything to hamper it. A true artist or writer shouldn’t care if their work is read.
Create to create.
True art is created when no one is watching. When it is assured that there will be no pay-off. When it is accepted that it will never be understood, talked about, or even read!
True art bursts out.
Is the fear of your work not being read or seen really about the work? Or is it about you?