They Got Us All Good

A comment of mine to a friend and fellow artist, commiserating about what it's like right now. Thought it may have some broader salience.

For any artist who isn’t in the top %, The Algorithm is not our friend. (Maybe even then, but that’s a slightly different story a think.)

The Social media companies use an aggregated firehose of all our content (millions and millions of paintings, photos, videos every day) to keep people glued to the screen. The “content” doesn’t have value from their pov independent of that purpose — and by and large memes do better numbers than paintings.

So most social media posts rarely get much notice but if they do, a “like” can help a post be seen by more people, but really it’s a measure of how much screen time a given post is likely to get that company. (As determined by their metrics and algorithms kept effectively inside a black box. It’s all very capitalist “dark gnosticism”, but in the most dumb way imaginable.)

Unless it hits a pretty high critical mass, what does that do for most of us? My website used to get 10,000 visitors on a good day, back in 2010. Now it gets 100. Outbound links are devalued...

Yet even knowing this, it’s one of the only ways to get in front of people these days without some major connections through other distro channels. Or so it would seem. They got us all good.