Will that new social media platform fundamentally improve your existence at all?
Research shows that social media generally does more harm than good, but is a way to use it in a healthy manner to grow your author business?
This article was originally published around the rise of Substack Notes, then expanded with the launch of Threads, and finally generalized as best as possible to all social media platforms. There will always be a new social media platform and this question will keep popping up. I’ve completely redesigned this post and added thousands of words, sources, and links.
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There is a very powerful sword belonging to a very powerful house in a very powerful Franchise That Shall Not Be Named that “only takes in that which makes it stronger”.
I think about that idea a lot.
As a fantasy author, I spend a lot of my time thinking about the best magical powers, and aside from luck, which would be endlessly useful in just about any situation, it’s hard for me to come up with a better power than the ability to discard that which does not serve you.
As a serial creative entrepreneur who is prone to shiny object syndrome, I have to work very hard to focus on that which will make me stronger and throw out the rest.
Even if something will serve me in the future, I am very careful about taking on things that will quickly fill my plate, as my plate is very small and prone to overflow.
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Thus, when a new social media platform launches, my initial reaction is always “oh no”.
I’m always eager to try new things, and a new social media platform is another game to play, which is appealing to my calculating brain. However, I know in my bones I cannot maintain a healthy relationship with social media.
Since I ended a very bad relationship with Facebook, and I’ve scaled back my use of Twitter and Instagram so that I barely check them…
…but I’m a recovering validation slut. I need those little hearts and retweets like I need air.
Or at least that’s my physiological response to it, even if my conscious mind knows that’s not true.
Earlier this year, I watched A Good Person and while I have many feelings about whether Zach Braff will ever make a movie that holds together in even the most tenuous way, Florence Pugh was a delight as a junkie searching for help as she circles the drain into oblivion.
Delightful might be a weird way to describe a woman spiraling into the darkness of addiction, but I’m sticking with it. She was incredible. I truly felt her pain every moment she was on screen.
The thing I always connect with most in movies about addiction is when the addict realizes they will never be “cured”. Addiction is a cycle that you can break but never be rid of completely. It is always there, in the back of your brain, waiting to strike…
…and if you aren’t careful, then it will tell you “Maybe a little wouldn’t hurt” in your weakest moment, urging you to pick up that phone again.
In your weakest moment, you will believe your lizard brain and the cycle will start again. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been clean for a week or a decade, that’s the work.
Even now, while I’m writing about being addicted to social media, I am wondering what is happening over on Notes. My fingers even twitched for a second there thinking about it.
There is no doubt that I’ve met some amazing people on social media, but it’s hard to separate that from the fact that they are fundamentally run by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and funded by venture capital.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity and a type of financing that investors provide to startup companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term growth potential. Venture capital generally comes from well-off investors, investment banks, and any other financial institutions. Venture capital doesn't always have to be money. In fact, it often comes as technical or managerial expertise. VC is typically allocated to small companies with exceptional growth potential or to those that grow quickly and appear poised to continue to expand. -Adam Hayes
Those investors want the founders to take their money and turn it into more money by squeezing the lifeblood out of its users.
Investors in venture capital funds are typically very large institutions such as pension funds, financial firms, insurance companies, and university endowments—all of which put a small percentage of their total funds into high-risk investments. They expect a return of between 25% and 35% per year over the lifetime of the investment. -Bob Zider
If an investor expects a 25% ROI, that means the company has to grow considerably more than that year-over-year in order to generate enough money to make the VC business model work.
In order for VC investments to make economic sense, they have to provide higher returns than the stock market average. Between 2010 and 2020, S&P 500 made an average annual return of 13.6%. So, VCs need to ensure a return of at least 15% yearly in order to make the investments worth the risk.
VCs generally invest in 25 to 40 startups, irrespective of the fund size. Now, since most startups and investments fail, a VC can logically expect to get its capital back when it has at least one high-performing startup in its portfolio.
Let’s understand this with an example. Let’s say a VC firm with a fund size of $100 million invests in 25 startups. For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the fund invests in each startup equally, i.e., $4 million. Let’s assume that one of the 25 startups is a high-performer that will return between 10 and 20 times its investment.
Now, 13 of the startups fail and return no money. 10 of them exit with small returns of about $6 million. 1 manages to provide medium returns of $50 million. And one true outlier exits as a unicorn at $1 billion. If the VC firm owns 25% of the high-achieving startup, it would get a return of $250 million. The fund’s total returns would be $360 million.
The Pareto principle applies here: 80% of the fund’s returns come from 20% of the startups in its portfolio. Since the VC fund size was $100 million, in this example, the VC firm was profitable.
However, more often than not, VC funds do not have an outlier in their portfolio, and therefore fail to return capital to their investors. Identifying a startup that has the potential to exit as a unicorn is not an easy feat and requires experience, knowledge, and sometimes a bit of luck.
How long do VCs have to wait for returns?
VC funds generally invest actively for three to four years and are locked in for about 7–10 years. Studies have shown however, that it takes about 12-14 years to fully liquidate returns. This is because not all startups with huge exit potential can do it within 10 years.
It is important to note that the longer the duration of the investment, the more returns the LPs want. There is no fixed percentage of returns that VCs target. While some look to gain 3X returns in 10 years, others consider 20% annual returns or 6X returns in 10 years as ‘respectable.’
But it is important to remember that during the entire duration of the investment, LPs are stuck with illiquid assets. So, when they want to liquidate their stakes in a VC fund at any point, they have to sell it for a discount.
Although VCs have come to be associated with glamor, they operate in an uncertain world where failure is more common than success. VCs themselves earn enough from carried interest (share of profit from exits) and yearly management fees. But they are answerable to LPs, which puts them under pressure – pressure that is often passed on to the founding teams of the startups they have backed – to perform. -Monica Ghosh
If you want to know the underlying reason for the enshittification of social media, it all comes down to this kind of thing. Social media companies are incentivized to raise money from venture capital to pay for marketing and growth. In order to entice creators, they make the platforms fun and easy to engage with your fans. Then, they pull the rug out from under you just when you rely on the platform most.
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. -Cory Doctorow
This is the perverse set of benchmarks VC-backed companies are placed under when they take investment money. In order to create value, they need users. So, they trick you into using their terrible platform by temporarily making it seem not terrible for a time.
It happened to Facebook. It happened to Instagram. It happened to Twitter (even in the pre-Musk days). It’s already starting to happen to Tiktok. It will happen to Threads, too, and everything that comes after it, because that’s how enshittification works.
Enshittification is when an online platform becomes more monetized and less user-oriented the longer it lasts. The term was theorized by Canadian writer and thinker Cory Doctorow to describe the trajectory of platforms like TikTok, Amazon and Twitter. He argued that platforms start out serving users by offering features that lure them in, then they serve advertisers and third parties by offering ad targeting and deals, and lastly they serve themselves and their shareholders by cheating and exploiting both advertisers and users. Doctorow calls this process "enshittification." -Know Your Meme
When one platform, like Facebook, succeeds, it has to support the entire industry by squeezing every dollar out of its users.
The thing with venture capital is that it doesn’t want you happy. Capitalism wants you to be depressed. Heck, it’s probably causing your depression.
Capitalism also creates alienation. As a society, in general, we’re tired, disconnected from each other, told to buy more, and work harder. The monetary inequity that our society faces alienates us by class and then from each other. We’re worried about the planet and future generations, but we’re also concerned with what we’re dealing with now. -Danielle Wayne
Capitalism does not present good options. At best, it presents less bad options and allows you to choose what part of your soul you want to betray in order to stay alive.
Yes, there is “choice”, but they are all bad ones. It just depends on what kind of bad you are able to tolerate without dying completely inside. It’s depressing, and that’s the point.
People are better capitalist consumers when they are depressed. Depression breaks down your willpower. It zaps your strength. It makes you more likely to click those precious ads that feed the gears of capitalism.
Social media has a reinforcing nature. Using it activates the brain’s reward center by releasing dopamine, a “feel-good chemical” linked to pleasurable activities such as sex, food, and social interaction. The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.
According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media. This puts a large amount of the population at an increased risk of feeling anxious, depressed, or ill over their social media use.
But what makes users come back for more even when it can literally make them feel sick?
“When the outcome is unpredictable, the behavior is more likely to repeat. Think of a slot machine: if game players knew they never were going to get money by playing the game, then they never would play,” Sperling says.
“The idea of a potential future reward keeps the machines in use. The same goes for social media sites. One does not know how many likes a picture will get, who will ‘like’ the picture, and when the picture will receive likes. The unknown outcome and the possibility of a desired outcome can keep users engaged with the sites.”
To boost self-esteem and feel a sense of belonging in their social circles, people post content with the hope of receiving positive feedback. Couple that content with the structure of potential future reward, and you get a recipe for constantly checking platforms.
When reviewing others’ social activity, people tend to make comparisons such as, “Did I get as many likes as someone else?,” or “Why didn’t this person like my post, but this other person did?” They’re searching for validation on the internet that serves as a replacement for meaningful connection they might otherwise make in real life.
FOMO—fear of missing out—also plays a role. If everyone else is using social media sites, and if someone doesn’t join in, there’s concern that they’ll miss jokes, connections, or invitations.
Missing experiences can create anxiety and depression. When people look online and see they’re excluded from an activity, it can affect thoughts and feelings, and can affect them physically.
A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance. Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly.
Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors. -McLean Hospital
Social media is one of the best delivery devices capitalism ever invented because it bombards you with a nonstop barrage of other people’s best moments while making you believe that your next purchase will solve all your problems.
If you wonder why social media makes you feel terrible, it is a feature of the system, not a bug.
There is no profit in happiness, thus it has no value in capitalism. That without value must be cast aside so the gaping maw of capitalism can be fed in perpetuity. Capitalism will always eat that which feeds it until it starves, I just wasn’t ready for it to happen so soon after I just kicked the habit of social media.
So, of course, I relapsed. Three months after Facebook disappeared me, I decided to try again. How bad could it be right? Lots of people ask me about this part, so here are the broad strokes of why my account was locked.
Last Monday, after Facebook flagged my ad account for no reason, they signed me out of mobile, preventing me from using their code generator to sign into my account using the 2-factor authentication on their app.
I have no access to my pages or anything.
There is literally no way to get Facebook live support anymore, and they caught me in a bizarre loop that prevents me from getting a code, and the only way to get the code is to sign into Facebook where they have the code.
It's the kind of Sisyphusian feedback loop that would make the vengeful gods of old proud.
As such, I was locked out of my account, effectively hacked by the company that owns all the interactions I've built up for nearly 15 years.
Worse than locking me out, they then deleted my account, along with tens of thousands of interactions, comments, posts, etc. from my entire history on Facebook.
Locking my account pissed me off, but deleting everything I have ever posted is a bridge too far. I was once the staunchest defender of Facebook, but now I realize that I was nothing to them.
They have literally proven that in an instant.
If Facebook were a person, what happened to me would be considered emotional abuse, but for a social media platform, it was just a normal Monday.
Still, as I mentioned before, I’m a social media addict. Just because I was “sober” for months didn’t change that fact. Unfortunately, one of the biggest truths about addiction is that people who recover often think that they can take just a little taste, which brings them back into the addiction cycle again.
I decided to just come back a little bit. I had created a burner account, and I figured how bad could it be to accept friend requests from people. There were hundreds waiting for me at that point.
So, I did, but I carefully unfollowed every person I friended so I wouldn’t see them in my news feed.
It turned out that wasn’t so bad. In fact, I started getting some DMs from old friends, and that was nice. So, I thought to myself, how bad could it be to join some of my favorite groups? At first, I unfollowed even the groups, but then I started to follow them again, which led to me seeing posts and commenting, which led to panic attacks when people would reply asking follow-up questions or disagree with me.
I had rolling panic attacks all that week. This is not a medical term since there is little scholarship behind having a panic attack for a week straight, but I know my body, and basically from Monday to Friday when I shut off my account again, I was in a constant state of panic and agitation.
It wasn’t until I talked about this with my business partner late Friday night that I realized what was happening. This was how I used to feel all the time, keyed up with every interaction. It wasn’t until I cut the addiction off and returned to it that I realized what was happening.
The same thing happened when I returned to shows.
I talk about being chronically ill often, but in years past it was possible to ignore my varied sicknesses for a few days at a time and drown them with caffeine when they did bubble up.
I would suffer after a show for pushing myself, but I was young enough to recover and bitter enough to keep going even when I should have rested.
I never knew how to take care of myself in my younger days, so I didn’t even know what it meant to feel well.
That changed with the pandemic and I turned inward to find out how to keep going. I saw how life could be, and what I was missing by running myself ragged.
I finally knew what it meant to be happy, even if only in fits and spurts, and now I’m no longer willing to destroy myself to sell a few more books. I don’t have that extra gear that convinced so many people to give my books a try.
I’ve been taking myself too well for too long to allow my mind to treat my body so poorly.
Shows used to be the only thing I knew how to do, and so I crushed shows. I put everything into them. They kept my company going even when I couldn’t do anything else right, and if I died on the show floor, so be it.
That sounds bonkers now, but I fervently believed it. Ethan Hawke’s character in Gattaca was my patron saint.
But eventually, I was lucky enough to learn skills and surround myself with people who showed me how to build a more sustainable business. Now, I can’t go back to how it used to be.
It took me less than a week to fall back into the old habits that made me feel terrible for years. So, I unfollowed almost all my groups. I will still keep getting DMs from friends because I like that part. Otherwise, I have to make a clean break for my own mental health.
Is there any hope in this hypercapitalist dystopia? Nebulously, but that’s about all you can hope for these days. I talked about the good news in my article How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia. I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but here’s the relevant bit of hope for you in all this mess.
There is good news, though.You can still make money without succumbing to the capitalist meat grinder. The exchange of money for goods and services is not the problem most people have with capitalism. This exchange isn’t even capitalism, it’s commerce, and there is a big difference between the two.
Commerce is the exchange or trading of goods and services. It has been around since human societies have existed but in different forms: from barter trading, like trading in fruits for silk, to using currency today with US Dollars, Mexican Pesos and other currencies to pay for lunch. -Suzanne Yada
Capitalism is a form of commerce that emphasizes profit and consolidated wealth built around private, free markets. It is generally categorized by the gluttonous and ceaseless need for endless growth to feed the need for line to go up. Plenty of scholarship exists which shows that capitalism does not require constant growth to exist…
…but there is no doubt that the nightmarish situation we find currently find ourselves in does require perpetual growth. It will, given enough time, devour itself, all the while knowing it is dying by its own hand and being unable to stop consuming anyway. The feeling you have deep inside your gut that the entire financial system is imploding on itself is a feature, not a bug, of the dominant economic paradigm we find ourselves in…
…but we don’t have to design our creative lives around that system to make money. Yes, we have to live in a capitalist system, but we can create an ecosystem more aligned with the values we hold dear inside our own businesses. All capitalists conduct commerce, but not all people who conduct commerce are capitalists.
While it is debatable whether capitalism can be ethical, there are ways to conduct ethical commerce within the systems forced upon us.
Where is the healthy line between commerce and capitalism? Therein lies the rub, because that line is a moving target, and it’s very personal for each of us.
Some people will be more comfortable further on the capitalist side of the spectrum and others would prefer to be further on the socialist side of the commerce spectrum. Some might even choose to extricate themselves from the system altogether and rely solely on bartering.
Each of these decisions comes with different constraints and strings attached to them which will influence how you move forward.
You can make more money as a hyper-capitalist, but the pressure to always perform for the approval of strangers and constantly prove yourself becomes harder to bear as the years wear on you. A system of bartering is a lovely thought, but it’s hard to exchange a goat for seven pairs of Levi’s unless you find the right trade partners, which is why currency is fungible in the first place.
There is no wrong answer, just what is right for you at this moment. Maybe in your early twenties, you are happy to delve deep into the seedy belly of capitalism to extract maximum value for yourself to live on later in life. Then, in your thirties, you decide that you would rather slow down and take your foot off the gas to preserve your mental health, and in your forties, you move to Peru and live in a yurt, knitting and bartering alpaca sweaters.
These decisions don’t define our lives, just phases of our lives. I’ve listened to the Tim Ferris Show for years, and hearing him grapple with the hyper-productivity he became a poster child for in his 20s, even though it no longer serves him in his 40s, is fascinating. If even he can shift his perspective on what serves him over time, then so can each of us do the same.
You can change your mind at any time and work toward a different equilibrium, but it starts with realizing that commerce can exist without capitalism, even in a capitalist economy. It takes self-reflection to start the ball rolling, and it takes work to maintain a healthy, balanced mindset once you find it.
There’s a lot more in the article, but I didn’t want you to think there’s no hope out there for us as creators. If you want even more, then it pairs very well with Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time?
While we’re talking about how VC firms use capitalism to keep you addicted to feeling terrible so that you buy all the things, we should probably discuss the value of a social media follower to your author business compared to the value of an email subscriber. Since we’re forced to live in a hypercapitalist hellscape, we might as well try to use it to our advantage, right?
The value of a newsletter subscriber is generally agreed by many to be around $40. However, that is variable based on many factors.
About 52% of companies spending less than $100 a month did report good open rates of 16% or more. Almost 75% of these companies reported an ROI of $21 or more for a dollar spent. On the other hand, companies that spent more ($500 or more) per month saw moderately higher open rates. About 57% reported open rates of 16% or more, and 51% of these companies saw an ROI of $31 or higher for every dollar spent. In fact, more than 50% of the overall respondents saw an average ROI of $21-$40 for every dollar spent.
This means whatever the company can budget for email marketing, whether $50 or $500, is a good investment. The determining factor may just be how much growth the business can handle. -Karthik Kashyap
By another calculation, an email subscriber is worth $1/mo, or $12/yr, though others argue that metric should really be $1/mo for everyone who opens your email.
How does this metric measure up on Substack? According to Substack, there are 20 million monthly active subscribers and 2 million paying members on the platform. By their own metrics, roughly 5%-10% of free subscribers eventually “go paid”.
Not every writer makes six figures overnight; some of the most successful writers on Substack took months to get to where they are today. The good news about subscription businesses is that recurring revenue is more steady and predictable than selling one-off content, like a book or an article.
Even so, as you continue on your journey as an independent writer, you’ll have to experiment with ways to keep growing. We tend to see 5-10% of free subscribers convert to paying subscriptions, with 10% being a rate to aim for. If your conversion rate is significantly below 10%, use tried-and-true tactics from other writers to improve it. -Substack
If that’s true, and we use the $5 base price Substack recommends publications charge for membership, that means that every subscriber is worth between $.25-$.50/mo, or somewhere between $3-$6/yr. While you can charge more than this per month, this value can also be augmented by offering consulting, selling products, or finding other ways to sell to your audience.
For instance, Last year I can track almost all of the $184,459.41 I made (in revenue, not profit) to my 25,000-person email lists, even though I didn’t have a subscription at all, because I launched ten books and multiple courses.
One important thing to note is that fiction newsletters often have to be bigger than non-fiction ones to get the same results since non-fiction email lists can offer courses, coaching, and more to their subscribers. I have a friend who runs a seven-figure business from a 6,000-person email list. Meanwhile, my fiction friends generally need a list of at least 20,000 people, plus need to invest in massive ad spends, in order to get the same results.
I estimate a fiction email list needs to be 4-5x a non-fiction email list to extract the same value, which is why I’m so bullish on places like Substack (where hosting is free) or sites like Flodesk or Beehiiv where you pay a flat fee for unlimited email storage and sends.
Meanwhile, the value of your whole Facebook author page is something like $60 to Facebook’s valuation.
A rough estimation of the average value of a Facebook page has been consistently quoted to be around $60. This is derived from Facebook’s initial public offering processed through its 800 million users and 900 million apps, games and other aspects of the whole. Naturally, there will be wild differences between one user’s personal page and the page of a major brand, but it can be assumed that for the purposes of Facebook’s advertising revenue, lower-end pages will pull on average toward this number. For the purposes of how much value can be derived from them by their owners, this again falls back to the number of sales they can convert as a direct result of their promotion on Facebook. -James Parsons
Of course, that is an average cost across every page. Within that, each page has a different value based on the follower count and engagement. I can tell you that before I lost my Facebook account, I had 15,000 fans on my page and it equated to about $1,000 a year in sales. That would make a follower worth roughly $.06.
However, this is not the only way you can monetize your social media accounts. Influencers can use their account to book sponsored advertising. How much could they make?
Micro influencers (10,000 - 50,000 followers): $100 - $500 per post. Mid-tier influencers (50,000 - 500,000 followers): $500 - $5,000 per post. Macro influencers (500,000 - 1,000,000 followers): $5000 - $10,000 per post. Mega influencers (1,000,000+ followers): $10,000+ -Shopify
From that pricing, it seems like 10,000 followers are worth $100 to a brand or $.01 per post.
If you can book one promotion a day that would be $36,500, or the value would be $3.65 per year in value. We all know you can’t book that many promoted posts, but that’s the highest value.
So, a Facebook follower is worth somewhere between $.06/yr and $3.65/yr, depending on how you use your account. That said, if you don’t have at least 10,000 followers, it’s nearly impossible to book these types of promotions.
Every social media platform has a different worth that shifts over time, but as you weigh your decision about going all-in on a new platform, it’s important to look soberly at those statistics.
Above just the ROI, you need to weigh whether you want to “build your castle in somebody else’s sandbox” and pour time into a platform where you don’t own the customer data. If the story of my Facebook account getting locked shows nothing else, it should show that a social media platform can be taken away from you in an instant, either by malice, stupidity, or simply by changing the algorithm to make it harder to connect with your followers. Then, the worth of your account drops to zero in an instant.
Additionally, I can grow my email list in the background of my business without being present constantly, while it’s much harder to monetize a social media audience without being completely present all the time. Plus, if anything happens, I can take those emails anywhere without losing years of work.
For me, the math isn’t worth it.
Since I started writing this article, Substack has moved more toward the social media end of the spectrum by introducing followers to Notes in a major way. Technically, you could follow people without subscribing to their publication for months, but they seem to be doubled down on it now.
You might personally like the idea of following a creator instead of subscribing to a publication because it lets you follow a lot more people, but as a creator, it locks me further into the Substack ecosystem in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
We have no access to our followers if we leave Substack in the same way that we have no access to them on Facebook, Twitter/X, Threads, Tiktok, or any other platform. We have access to our subscribers, but not our followers.
Therein lies the rub.
The introduction of followers increases the value of the platform as a whole without carrying that value over to the creators that built the platform, and I don’t like it. Now, I am building value for Substack without reciprocity.
The principle of reciprocity describes a human need for a give and take in a relationship. For the “gift” to have the most meaning, it needs to be offered in a way that seems genuine, without the expectation of return. But in business, there is an expectation of return; therefore, the principle of reciprocity should be built on trust by offering incentives to customers, but also by offering customer service and complaint resolution policies that inspire that trust. -Lahle Wolfe
I happily provide value without any expectation of reciprocity to subscribers, but I do not have that same agreement with Substack or any other platform. I build on Substack so we can both win together. This feels completely one-sided in a way I have never felt with any of their other platform decisions.
I understand that some people might have asked for it, but it decreases the value of Substack to me as a creator. Additionally, it forces me to add another factor into the equation when I leave the platform. The more factors that go into my decision, the harder it is to leave when things go pear-shaped.
The people who run these platforms know that we pay a high cost when we leave, and they go to extraordinary lengths to keep those costs as high as possible. They know that the harder it is to leave their walled gardens, the worse they can treat us without risking our defection. -Cory Doctorow
It’s great for Substack because it ties us deeper into the platform, but, at the end of the day, it’s just another hook to keep you locked into an environment. It’s a subtle, gentle hook, but a hook nonetheless, and one that only benefits Substack’s network effects without benefitting ours.
Network effects are real, and you can’t understand the history of networked computers without an appreciation for them. Famously, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet networking, coined “Metcalfe’s Law”: “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2).” That is, every time you add a new user to a network you double increase the number of ways that users can connect with one another. -Electronic Frontier Foundation
When we own the chain of custody for our subscribers, platforms lose. They only gain significant value when they control the data and can dole it out as they see fit. If we can take our subscribers and leave the platform without repercussion, their stock value doesn’t go up.
It’s the same reason why publishers try to grab any many rights as possible for as long as possible. Their value is in the size of the horde they collect.
Music assets are selling for unusually high valuations. During the last 25 years, songwriting catalogs generally sold for about eight to 12 times the “net publisher’s share,” or the amount of revenue the songs generated minus the royalties paid out to the performers and songwriters. Today, valuations are hitting 25 to 30 times the publisher’s share, according to industry experts and executives. -Ryan Faughnder
The value is not in the size of a platform. It’s in how much of it a company owns, and they want to own it all.
This is a dangerous precedent for Substack and, sadly, sends it further down the road of every social media platform that came before it.
So ask yourself this question. Do you really want to sign up for a new social media app, or are you searching for the transformation you hope will come from a new social media app, and how it could change your life circumstances?
This is the question at the heart of joining any new platform for me. I am not looking for a new social media app. I don’t really care about social media. If I joined, I would only be searching for the transformation that a new social media app promises.
What is that transformation for you?
If you’re a grassland, you’re probably looking to be known as a thought leader. If you’re a forest, you’re probably looking to connect with a group of fans who adore your quirky, unique voice. If you’re a tundra or aquatic, you’re probably looking to tap into your fandom to build excitement for a launch or expand into new formats.
But, are there other ways to get that same result without social media? There probably is. My articles get read by 10,000+ people. I can’t imagine more than that saw my posts on social media.
So, a successful Substack publication can probably accomplish the same thing social media can for most ecosystems. You don’t have to build in Notes, even. You can use advertising, or group promotions like book clubs or viral builders, or even somewhere like Bookfunnel promos to gather readership who will follow your publication.
There is a great post by
about how there are only two types of social media apps.“Social media” actually refers to two very different types of apps:
Social: “I want to connect with others.”
Media: “I want to be entertained.”
An app that pursues both at once is destined to lose. -Peter Yang
This is a great insight, but I kind of think the same is true with creators. Are you a social creator who builds community around you filled with two ways conversations or are you a media creator who wants to push out content to an audience and have more of a teacher-student relationship with your subscribers?
Will a new platform actually make you the person you want to be? That is the fantasy social media is selling. They sell you the dream of having an audience clamor on your every word and let you live the life you have envisioned for years.
There is so much FOMO in not joining that we tell ourselves this is the one that will change everything so we can’t sit out.
Fear of missing out (FoMO) is a unique term introduced in 2004 to describe a phenomenon observed on social networking sites. FoMO includes two processes; firstly, perception of missing out, followed up with a compulsive behavior to maintain these social connections. -Mayank Gupta and Aditya Sharma
Is that realistic, though? How many people will actually win that lottery? Is it a lottery that is even worth winning?
People talk about the “glory days” of social media when the internet was better, but I don’t think those days ever really existed.
What I do think existed were moments when “social media salons” formed.
If you don’t know about salons, they were moments in time when the conditions were such that great minds converged in a singular place and created a community together.
Once upon a time, in a pre-smartphone world, people had to make their own entertainment. And so enters the salon, an Italian-influenced tradition of gathering of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, philosophers and intelligencia that flourished during a period known as the ‘age of conversation’. Dating back to the 17th century, guests would assemble in the fabulous private residence of an inspiring host to share their latest ideas – and naturally, a few glasses of wine. Historically, European salons, notably in Paris, were among the few places where men and women of various social hierarchies could mingle and, most importantly, where women were in charge, carrying crucial and powerful roles as regulators. -Alice Brace
Silicon Valley in the 80s was one of them. Paris in the 20s was another. Lovecraft had one in Los Angeles in the 30s.
I believe the same thing happened on social media.
At a certain time and place on the internet, people found their “salons” where the conditions were just right and they caught the pocket perfectly to find a wholesome community that fed them.
I don’t think any social media platform was ever good. I will die on that hill. However, I do think that in certain moments, the right collection of people gathered in a singular place and created magic.
Whether you found that on Twitter, Instagram, or wherever, it’s okay to mourn it…but it likely is gone.
You can go to Paris today, but it’s not like being there at the peak of Hemingway’s era when the greatest writers of the day all gathered in a single cafe.
I feel like Substack has become that place for me. I found it on Kickstarter in the mid-2010s. I have been very lucky to find it multiple times in my life, and I cherish it, but I also know it won’t be there forever.
Eventually, the conditions change and salons break up into the wind. They don’t last forever, and they can never be recreated, no matter how hard you try.
If you actually want a new social media app for whatever reason people care about with new social media apps, then you should go for it.
Social media is genuinely exciting to deserts. There are optimizations to find, codes to crack, and games to win. If you are a desert, a new social media platform probably feels like a boon to your business. If you aren’t a desert, you should find one to be your social media manager.
For other ecosystems, there are usually more negatives than positives with social media unless you win the game.
Do you want scale or do you want security? When I dig down deep with authors, most of them don’t have any interest in virality or scaling. What they want is to be secure in the knowledge that when they release something an audience will buy from them and adoringly read their work.
They want to know if they can pay their mortgage next month. Moreso, they want to know they’ll be able to do this work for the next year and many years down the road.
There are some people who genuinely want virality and to be a personality, but if you don’t care about that, I would ask whether you want that movie deal, or the ability to spend two years focused on your work with the money that comes from it.
Do you really want 100,000 followers, or do you want the $50-$100k in stable income every year that possibly comes with that kind of following?
Do you want a big following, or do you want to do the work you care about for an audience that matters?
Those are two very different things. They are interconnected, but you can build a great business with a relatively small following.
I’m not saying tiny, but getting a sustainable 10,000 engaged people on your mailing list is attainable for most humans with time and effort. It also can be done without giving the whole of your life to get there. These strategies work well without consuming your life the way social media does for many people, myself included.
I won’t even make you read the article. Here are the headers from that article. Each of these has netted me thousands of emails over the years.
Prelaunch your book or paid membership on Kickstarter/your website/Indiegogo/Substack
Join paid (or free) group promos
Organize an anthology
Join Bookfunnel and/or StoryOrigin
Form a book club around your genre
Round robins
Exhibit at conventions
Set up your website to encourage subscribers
Get your back matter right
“Go wide” with your work
Maybe only one of those resonates with you, but they work best in tandem together. If you want more info on any of them, I suggest you check out the article I linked above.
Most authors hate the social media game and despise the performative machinations social media forces on them. It is worth it if they win, but they rarely win, and then it becomes a burden.
If you’re looking at social media as simply a means to an end, then ask yourself if/how other social media sites have actually helped you reach that end.
Can this new social media app actually accomplish your stated goal? Is it worth the trouble finding out? Will it light you up more than it will drain you?
Most importantly, are there better ways to get that without leveraging a new social platform?
Because there is a big opportunity cost in investing in a social media platform, even for a short time. There is a mental load cost and a sunk cost in spending your time trying to get traction somewhere. There is an even bigger one with failing and picking yourself up off the floor.
Maybe you finish this thought exercise and say “yes, it’s still worth it”, and that’s fab.
However, if you’re still on the fence, I would question whether your previous efforts were worth it and whether there’s a better way for you to spend your time instead of being a statistic to boost a company’s stock price.
Very few people can win the viral game. Yes, Booktok helped inject millions into the publishing industry last year, but that power was vastly concentrated in very few titles.
Colleen Hoover won. She deserves everything. However, since then she has been used as a model for other authors, “encouraging” them to use Tiktok b/c there’s money there. I use that term loosely because it’s usually more like guilting or cajoling or at best flippantly replying to a heartfelt plea for help with advice to just try this new shiny thing to fill the darkness in your soul.
Whenever I see that type of thing, I remember that most people who won the gold rush were selling pickaxes and maps. Levi’s won the gold rush.
Another fascinating story is that of Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis. The Levi’s story is the stuff of legends… During the Californian Gold Rush, these two men wanted to cash in on the action, but they did not head for the river grabbing their tin pans. They invented the riveted-pocket work pants we know as “jeans” today, and also sold picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. What they did not do is… pan for gold. When panning for gold, you have a slim chance for a huge payoff. Most miners went home with nothing after betting everything they have on mining for gold. Levi and Jacob however made money from every prospector who came to town wanting to pan for gold, regardless of what their gold haul is…
This important metaphor may help new startups navigate the waters of their business model. Instead of focussing their energy and efforts trying to become the next big hit with a handsome payoff, why not sell picks and shovels? -Transit protocol
There are a million sustainable paths to build your author career that can fulfill you, but every way I know how to make money is boring.
Almost every way successful authors make money is boring. Even people who go viral usually don’t sustain it for long. Even viral stars build boring companies. They build marketing companies, or sell physical goods, or become advertising brands. Some become angel investors. Yes, they also make money with their videos, but they usually get rich doing something very boring.
Social media promises excitement, but excitement is a very small part of a sustainable business, even for a tundra, who monetizes excitement best among all the ecosystems.
If you love social media and/or get something from it, awesome, but if you are doing it for the money instead of the lolz, then there probably ain’t money in them there hills for you.
That said, you might strike it rich just by trying. A few people did in the gold rush days, and they were immediately used as examples to get other people to buy in and keep the money flowing.
If that doesn’t sound great to you, though, maybe instead of chasing social media fame, pour that energy into writing a new book, learning advertising, or figuring out what marketing will work for you that fills you up instead of drains you.
Even if it is good now, will it really be good for long? For some of us, the answer is yes, but is it a yes for you?
Social media networks sell a dream. They tell you that you will be happy on this platform; that this platform will solve your problems; that it will turn you into the person you always wanted to be.
But nothing is a simple bullet to that dream, and I’m sick of being fed a dream. I would rather plant somewhere and make the dream true in a place that feels good to me.
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Reading this has me really feeling like I'm right to decide to pull back on social media. It's become harder to connect with others now as everyone is shouting into the void but there's not much interaction. I suppose it's not a shock given how social media goes, but it still stings because I had made good friends in the early day and still talk to a bunch. I wonder what sort of friends I would have made if social media didn't change the way it always does.
It's a hell of a long article but it's a deeply detailed one and I appreciate it. It may be that I cam to Substack just too late to enjoy it before its "Notes" renders it more of a new SM platform than the paying creative hub that has drawn much talent to it, I guess we shall see. But it still seems like a good place to kick that scrolling habit so pervasive on the familiar trio of big SM platforms. Thank you!