Welcome to another addition of “David dictates his blog post into his phone because his son is on some bullshit.”
I was thinking today about how social media throttles our posts. It’s some thing that we’ve known for quite some time. It started probably seven or eight years ago. Once the algorithm started getting better and Facebook started “helping” us by curating our feeds suddenly people couldn’t see the things that we were posting anymore, unless they had proper keywords.
experienced this first hand. Undo undo it all. Fuck that doesn’t work. OK. I experience this firsthand when I would release a book on broken river and that book announcement would get several hundred likes and comments, but the actual book release itself would only get a handful, usually two or three likes and just as many comments.
it became evident to me again today when I was posting on Twitter and out of curiosity I checked my impressions. I’m only getting a dozen or so impressions on a tweet to begin with, and as we’ve discussed in the past tweets themselves only have half-life of a half an hour, so that means that my tweets are literally not being seen by my nearly 2000 followers.
this presents a real problem for independent artists, especially when they want to release a new project and they want a lot of people to see it such as in the case of my gods fair no better project that I announced yesterday, or my no country podcast.
At this point, it might be more beneficial to actually contact people directly. I wish there was a way to do that without being creepy, but that legitimately might be the project going forward. Finding 5 to 10 people and presenting them with the work that you’ve done, so that they can at least know about it. I do have a newsletter with about 300 people subscribe to it, so I may use that but overall I’m having a real hard time breaking out of this hard cap of about 300 people in general looking at my content. that’s also where the no country podcast is in terms of listenership, and I just have no idea how to get it over that 300 number.
I said in a blog post several months ago that maybe we should pretend like the Internet doesn’t exist. I haven’t followed my own advice on that, although maybe I should. Maybe we have to go back to the days of firing or having live shows and getting fans that way. It really does seem that Twitter is this scheme where somebody hands you a microphone and says broadcast to your hearts content and they’re just treating you like a child, or something. Where there’s nobody in the room that you’re talking to but they know that if they give the big boy his microphone the big boy is going to feel like the big boy is important.
seriously, all of this might be an a Normas waste of time. Our time might be better spent connecting with people one to one every single day. There’s 365 days in a year and if you multiply that by five well you have a number that is significantly bigger than the impressions you’re going to get on Twitter.
The only real spike in traffic I experienced recently was when people were mad at me. I got a bunch of new blog subscribers and followers on Twitter which was nice but I don’t want to spend my life in constant conflict, being the villain to everybody else, I’m just not built that way despite my tendency to say things that upset people.
if I had to describe the feeling of the time it was it would be that we’re all in cages that are getting smaller and smaller and that groups are getting smaller and smaller and that’s totally fine I understand the value of being in a bubble especially when everything is becoming flattened so that it becomes palatable to everybody else. I get the idea of being more niche. However the problem is that at a certain point you do have to branch branch out a little bit in order to even have the people there to look at your contact in the first place. But now I’m moving in circles I will give this more thought. Have a good day.
Broken River Blog 