WHY I ABANDONED 60,000 FOLLOWERS AND DELETED MY SOCIAL MEDIA

I've written one blog post and have been drafting more about artists getting paid and other important topics around creative work that most people have wrong ideas about, but I saw this and damn if this person doesn't explain it very succinctly.

Especially in regards to photography, which so much of it sucks SO BAD these days and looks so similar:

"In our chat we discussed what it’s like to create art in the age of social media. She raised a fantastic point about how social media trains creatives to be inauthentic. At the least, social media trains us to stay within the lane of our “brand”. An ill-curated feed results in disorder and unfollows galore. At its worst, social media changes the way we create, fundamentally.

In our conversation, Sara makes a point that over time, social media trains us to create and post in a manner that pleases the apps’ algorithm. If a post does really well and followers respond well to a certain kind of image or technique, we begin to form a Pavlovian drive to replicate that response."

I've been saying this for so long: real artists should not give a shit about what they think the "audience" wants. It should be about your inner vision---unless you don't have one, in which case you should probably stop making "work." I don't care about how many Likes I get, or what posts will "perform well"; I am perplexed by how people engage with my social media, and when I see that certain posts do better than others, it only proves to me that people are mostly worthless and have no taste whatsoever.

I wanted to also add: in my opinion, up-and-coming artists like myself and most of the rest of us are much more likely to have our work stolen as a result of posting it on social media than to have some kind of "opportunity" or connection made through the post.

Read the full article here:

https://www.diyphotography.net/why-i-abandoned-60000-followers-and-deleted-my-social-media/?fbclid=IwAR1DARnAGeKF8b-9lhaBXbX58CE0_uEztGsXhZrujyNgp1Ig3OXjVahlnFM#disqus_thread