Btw just to throw some numbers on this: if you go back to like... 2010. A lot of social media consists of links to sites, not creations denuded of their creator. Someone like me now and then would frontpage digg or Reddit. People would go to my site. That could be worth hundreds of dollars in a day. - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

zachweinersmith.bsky.social • 100 days ago

Btw just to throw some numbers on this: if you go back to like... 2010. A lot of social media consists of links to sites, not creations denuded of their creator. Someone like me now and then would frontpage digg or Reddit. People would go to my site. That could be worth hundreds of dollars in a day.

Reposted from Zach Weinersmith

This is the ultimate outcome of almost all social media. You make stuff, grow a following, the network gets paid. It’s not just Elon, it’s Reddit, Instagram, and really most of the internet users now consume.

Comments

inkalomax.bsky.social•100 days ago

Thanks for this

pigmywurm.bsky.social•100 days ago

Going from the hyperlink driven internet to this feels like the digital equivalent of replacing the shops and businesses in a city or neighborhood, which you can walk around or use public transit as you want, with a few massive malls where everything is all together and you aren't supposed to leave.

orman.bsky.social•100 days ago

I'm wondering how much of the "first party" Internet was supported by the likes of GReader too. I remember I saw you and xkcd on your own sites, the day you put something new out because of that. Now I constantly miss stuff because the algorithm doesn't bother to show me

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

My sense is that's also around 2015, when it's discovered that you can get more engagement by showing people titillating addictive stuff than by showing them what they asked for. It's like if you went to a restaurant and every time you asked for salad you got crack-twinkies. Soon, you're an addict.

orman.bsky.social•100 days ago

Vienna Teng did "Hymn of Acxiom" about that sort of engagement farming strategy (sung from the POV of "the algorithm") all the way back in 2013, so it might have been in the works for a while

multiverserift.bsky.social•100 days ago

Thanks for unraveling and summarizing this mess, Zach.

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

Occasionally something like an extra thousand a day, not to mention lots of new readers who would actually go to your site!

Effectively what happened is that, due to a combination of network design and human laziness, more and more people would put their work directly on the social network.

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

Around 2015 or so, social networks seemed to discover that they could make maximum money not just by encouraging this structurally, but by enforcing it, e.g. crushing views if you tried to link out to your site.

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

One of the weiiiiird results is that you can now get way way way more viewers of your work while making a fraction of the money.

Personally, I think it's irreversible. Plus AI is about to make things even weirder. But I feel like it deserves an epitaph?

numerius.bsky.social•100 days ago

When you say weird you mean normal in rentier capitalism (in the Brett Christophers sense), right? :D

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

Like, I'm lucky I have a somewhat separate career in books, and lately articles and other stuff. But I've seen a lot of people who were able to make a decent living in the old system now having to scrimp and work harder despite having more readers. Others just become employees of big corporations.

derrelldurrett.bsky.social•100 days ago

What tools do the big corps provide that a collective of creators could not? (And a big enough collective could hire out the grunt work.)

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

To my mind the really nasty aspect is like... artists never made that much money in general! But thanks to algorithms being able to monitor everything, and to the ad duopoly, companies like Instagram effectively can take an artist who would make 25k a year and turn it into 5k. Or less.

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•100 days ago

I mean maybe people don't realize but sites like Facebook take something like 98% of revenue you generate for them! They can do this because of massive network power. Your only rebellion is to drop off the network, and then you lose that 2% you got and become forgotten.

dzeeszed.bsky.social•100 days ago

This is also the Spotify model, right? Customers have access to way more music than they used to. Musicians who could never get on the radio can now have a wider streaming audience. And streamed songs pay nothing.

merari.bsky.social•99 days ago

At r/comics were aware that directly posting to reddit gets artists way more views than linking to their site.

Which is why we encourage them to make a comment in their post that links to their site, socials and crowdfunding. Gotta try and support.

(pls post to the sub, your comic rules)

zachweinersmith.bsky.social•99 days ago

I still post occasionally :)

dvpierce.bsky.social•100 days ago

The web used to be a lot more about linking different sites. Then it became about trapping people on your site to keep all the advertising bucks.

Thanks, Facebook.

artologica.net•100 days ago

Zach, I wrote a whole newsletter about how small makers used to be able to get featured on big publications (I was on Make, BoingBoing, Wired, NBC News) and then they came up with paid affiliate links and now it's all "articles" about "the 35 best things on Amazon" 😕

artologica.net•100 days ago

I never published it because I'm trying to avoid having my "brand" be how much it sucks to be an independent artist 😔

artologica.net•100 days ago

Why write about things you actually like when you could get a 5¢ kickback on every bottle of shampoo sold?

mihainica.bsky.social•100 days ago

Great read. "squozen" is a top tier adjective!

orbitaloasis.bsky.social•100 days ago

This pretty accurately describes the term 'enshittification'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

spacecowboy17.bsky.social•100 days ago

With Bluesky's custom feeds, do you think there is a chance to reverse this?

I imagine a feed of "Posts with links other people also liked". It would look at the posts with links you liked, find other people who liked them and then show you what other posts with links they liked.

spacecowboy17.bsky.social•100 days ago

I built this algorithm into my hobby project: https://LinkLonk.com and it should be fairly straightforward to adapt it to a custom Bluesky feed.

The only thing is to make it work fast enough for the scale of Bluesky. A naive version would not scale well because of the large fanout at each step.