Welcome to Exodus 25. If you’re a new reader, this is where I take a weekly look at the forces which persuade us in the modern world, and how we operate within them, as people, businesses and brands, to persuade each other. Please comment or restack on what has, or has not, persuaded you about what you read here.
A bonus personal weekend post for you this week, I hope it resonates.
Socials and self-talk
Perhaps my greatest fascination is with the lies we tell ourselves. It’s the most persuasive force on any human, regardless of status or ideology.
If I’m in any way unusual it’s that I like analysing my self-deception. I’ve been aware of it for such a long time, since I was a teenager, that my foibles now seem like old friends. I tut at them, but mostly accept them.
Some days that can still turn into dark thoughts, but more of the time it’s just fascinating. I could roll out any number of labels to describe the motivation and foundation for these impulses, but to do so would ultimately just be me transferring that deception to you, in an effort to persuade you to not think badly of me.
What I choose not to do for myself I instead do for others. Because it’s my ability to sense all these things, and to make sense of this jumble of emotion and ensuing justification, that I ally with knowledge about general human psychology and culture to design the strategies to make brands persuasive.
But all of that knowledge and intent runs into a brick wall on social media these days. I may as well post in a self-invented language known only to me. I know this because after a year, and this 39th Substack article, I have 37 subscribers.
This is not a “poor me, I’m just terrible at socials” pity party. In the past I’ve had social accounts with audiences of thousands on Twitter, IG, even Google+ way back when. I used to be good at it! But what works has changed and my communication of deep, sometimes contrarian, thinking does not please algorithms.
I felt seen and reassured by an article from
this week, ‘The inbound marketing era is ending’, especially this thought:Follower counts might as well not even be real when all they provide is potential reach (if algos decide to show your work). Your community and distribution are now fully mediated by algorithms that serve their own interests and the banality of the crowd. A post can vanish in the churn, no matter how engaged your “audience” claims to be.
Issues beyond the algos
I find general behaviour on socials these days has changed a great deal and not all of it can be blamed on algorithms, it’s also present in individual behaviours. I’ve had two instances in the last week of people asking to connect with me on LinkedIn and then, after a brief DM interaction, ghosting me when I asked about expanding the conversation. I can only assume they didn’t actually want to talk to me, they just wanted to secure DM access to me, to send me a sales pitch at a time of their choosing in the future. Sadly they have underestimated my memory and curation skills, I’ll disconnect them soon enough.
This is symptomatic of a general lack of curiosity and reciprocity. For my Substack articles, each has been shared on LinkedIn and Bluesky, to little interest. Judging by the “activity” star rating in the Substack dashboard I probably have about 15/37 subscribers actually reading articles regularly.
I’ve written lots of “notes” in that part of the Substack platform, restacked quotes from others’ articles into notes and I’ve subscribed to over 50 others. They sometimes give that effort a little like, but don’t seem to check me out or subscribe in return.
Curiosity used to be normal social media behaviour. No longer. Now it’s “Take what you can, give nothing back”. We excuse this, tell people it’s OK to be a lurker. It’s not, it’s antisocial.
It’s just as well I haven’t wasted time by replicating this failure on other platforms. I sometimes dash off thoughts on LinkedIn, but they’re mostly ill-formed and it doesn’t please me to communicate like that. Substack has reminded me of the joys of taking a little more time and care. So I’ve largely taken to deleting LinkedIn posts after a couple of days if they’ve had no engagement.
The ratio of “average post impressions to followers” on LinkedIn is so poor now that I question whether accumulating them has any value. I have 900+ followers but only 6 posts in the last 12 months have had over 1K impressions. Only 1 has had more than 2.5K impressions. Various tests I’ve done indicate that the LinkedIn algorithm has become about virality around certain keywords, you either get a big reward for talking about the “right things” or none at all. To be honest I find it hard to hide my distaste for that platform and its content these days, so best to keep my interaction with it minimal, for everyone’s sake.
Likewise with Bluesky, I love the format, I still do it like it’s 2012 Twitter and I get a smattering of engagement from a small group on there, but it’s been nearly a year since I switched to there from X, I’ve posted nearly 400 times and I’ve amassed a grand total of 35 followers!
What to make of the situation
It would be very easy to lie to myself about all this or believe the lies of others.
“I must not be hustling hard enough, do more, post more, interact more, it will happen.”
I don’t believe it will. I believe I would only make myself unhappy in trying. I think many people with lonely working lives enjoy posting as an outlet for expression. They don’t give a fuck who reads it, or if anyone reads it, it’s mostly just self-talk. That’s where we’re at. Like a nightclub at the end of the night with one person dancing away, eyes closed, oblivious as the dancefloor empties.
I have noticed that the people I would most like to hear from on social media post very little, whilst those who gabble away about trite matters are never silent for long. As Eleanor Roosevelt commented:
“Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People”
All this could seem a little glum, but it is what it is. I’m told the Substack platform in general is growing and others are reporting success, but I think it reflects the “interest graph” nature of socials today as well as the general end times of the attention economy. If you’re sharing trendy subjects it’s possible to attract attention, but if not you’re unlikely to become visible to potential allies. You’ve either built an audience by now or not. It makes it hard to start new tribes, we’re encouraged to just join existing ones.
I’m not sure how fast the drift away from mainstream social platforms will happen. I gave up posting or consuming content on Facebook and Instagram a long time ago, but they’re still being used by millions. I like the idea of cosy media and worker-owned media co-operatives. I’m an avid Letterboxd user and that’s one corner of the internet that doesn’t feel broken at all, quite the opposite.
But in terms of freelance work and the role of social media in communicating what I offer… I’d be lying to myself if I said I had a clue how to make that work going forward.
Valuable social work
The awful truth may be that I am simply misguided in all my intent. That a thinking-machine age is upon us and human intellectuals are now needed in far fewer numbers and only in specific areas. Amidst a giant human population (which has doubled in my 50-year lifetime and will reach its maximum in the next half-century) the thoughts of any one person, unless already in a position of influence from the attention economy years, are as grains of sand in a desert. If so a technofeudalist future seems inevitable.
I’ve been reading a lot of Charles Bukowski lately. He’s long been a favourite anti-hero of mine, but as the pointlessness of my social communication settles upon me I’ve returned to his writing as a source of comfort.
I wrote on Bluesky the other day:
I just turned 51. Is that old enough for me to have officially entered my "old man yells at cloud" phase? Because it sure does feel like it at the moment.
My current favourite self-deception is that maybe my writings will be discovered long after my death and find an audience. I’d be ok with that. Bukowski had similar thoughts, I’ll leave you with this excerpt from his poem Friends within the Darkness:
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible—
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.
the old composers — Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.