Okay, let’s not be lazy about it this week; I’ll actually talk about stuff this time.
I know, I know, still no art in sight; I’ve doodled some stuff here and there, but nothing directly related to the website; chalk it up to the regular excuses and let’s move on to other stuff.
I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately, and the requirements that it takes to become noticed on various platforms. The tricky thing is that each website tends to play by its own rules and algorithms; YouTube famously changes up their style every few months, Instagram is so invested in promoting Reels over pictures in order to compete with TikTok, and who knows what kind of horrific slurs you have to spout to even be spared a second glance on Twitter these days. For me, the latest challenge is Bluesky, and the tricky thing about this new platform is that it has no algorithm at all. There’s no magic bullet, no quickfire method of rapidly gaining followers, nothing to exploit to be seen; the only way is to post, repost and interact with others constantly and consistently, just like it used to be on other socials way back when. In other words, to gain ground on this social media platform, you have to be social. *thundercrack*
Social interaction has always been a hit-or-miss thing with me; I’m introverted by nature, and have a very limited pool of social energy that I prefer to spend on people close to me. I can handle small groups, which is why board games and TTRPGs work for me, but if I have to do it for more than a couple days in a row, I can get burnt out. Now picture trying to socially engage with hundreds to thousands of potential people in order to build a community that you deliberately want to see everything that you post online; you can see how that can be exhausting. Even trying to engage on an individual basis can be tough; I never want to come across as parasocial, even if I am genuinely not, but that’s the anxiety talking again.
I used to want to try and post something online every single day; that quickly went nowhere, partially due to workloads and partially because I couldn’t always find something significant to say on a daily basis. This is the primary reason I only blog once per week; there’s only so many times I can say the same thing over and over, especially if I’m in a creative rut or at a roadblock in life. Also, given how much I angst on here, I feel like I’m slipping into a habit that I’ve wanted to avoid: constant negativity. In the early days of my online presence, I tried never to post anything overly critical, or scathing, or negative in any way; if you can’t say something nice, shut the hell up, basically. There’s already so much bad stuff out there, I wanted to make sure that if I posted anything, it wasn’t going to contribute to the negativity. However, my ever-growing cynicism being what it is, any negativity that I wanted to avoid was inevitably turned inwards, and that was the perfect recipe for angst. In the year that I’ve been back on this website, I made every effort to haul myself out of the negative self-image that I wanted to leave behind, only to gradually turn around and start soaking my feet in it again.
I’m going to do better; I’m going to get myself properly motivated, I’m going to post stuff that makes people happy, and I’m going to turn my self-image back around to something positive. And in case I need a little extra motivation, there’s always Batman:
Ciao for now.