Doing The Opposite:
How To Survive Social Media Without Selling Your Soul to the “Scroll”
The text in your thumbnails aren’t bold enough. Where’s the high contrast? Make sure to place your face in the ratio of thirds next time, won’t you? Your CTR has been suffering lately, so try to make your titles as click-baity as possible, next time, dear soul. Your filename does match the actual title, right? How do you ever hope to get SEO backlinks? Run some tags through Claude, then compare them with Chat. Be more succinct. Even this intro is too wordy. Where’s the hook? And so it goes, on and on and onwards evermore.
In this essay, I’ll provide some more content creation counter-culture and against-the-grain growth tips to keep your integrity intact, insanity inhibited and your subscriber count still subtly scaling.
Ready? Marvellous.
But before we get into that, let’s provide a primer. A crash course as to context. Let’s discuss the modern “scroll” of Social Media.
The Similitude of the Modern Feed
Pick any niche, any interest, on any platform and I would surmise that 70–90% of the formulaic pattern of packaging will be exactly the same. Not just kind of similar, not holding a sort of semblance, but absolutely the same.
Title: “Why I do X + Y + Z for this Reason (and You Should Too)”
Thumbnail: Confused face, dark background.
Bold text overlay, contrasted colour: ‘Just Do This’
or
Title: “[Subject Matter] The [something][something] that [something] [something]”
Thumbnail: Person looking straight at camera, pointing at one of the “somethings”.
Bold text overlay, Contrasted colour: ‘This Is It’
Sound familiar? Because it is. Depressively so. Now, just to clarify, I didn’t run that through a chatbot. I made those up myself intuitively. But here’s what the machines actually came up with when I asked them about this problem:
courtesy of Duck.ai/chat
You get the point, one assumes?
Every. Single. Feed. A plenitude of precisely the same prototype in perpetuum ad infinituum.
Por qua? Por que, si. Especialmente if you want to get your stuff out there.
You see, once upon a time, the Internet wasn’t so optimised for discoverability. It had subjects and interests and niches and hidey holes all over the place, packaged and presented in every which way you could think of. The webpages were a tad bland, in all honesty. Yet in its own primitive way, all tastes were catered for. You had to search for what you wanted. It seems people still had attention spans. Access to such Interwebs was in itself limited to laptops and desktops. But the machines have changed all that.
Artificial Optimisation
Some very clever people started analysing what was popular, to see if any patterns emerge. Was there a sequence to success? A formula to getting found? These analyses eventually got fed into the developing Language Learning Models. These programs in turn could tell you straight away what language, images, and video sequences were getting the most airtime and traction, the most popular type of packaging, and how people browsed. For content creators, this was a magical era. Follow their surgically precise suggestions, and wham. Virality ensued. Monies poured in, and happily all a creator, entrepreneur, entertainer, business owner etcetera had to do was follow the robotic suggestions to replicate success.
And thus Titles started to change. Tags with the greatest reach replaced those that were more relevant to the content in question. Thumbnails had a familiar look to them. All and sundry followed suit. Views, Follows and Likes skyrocketed, because you could be discovered.
Then that data of what constitutes optimised packaging, as it snowballed, was fed back to the machines, which in turn got suggested back to us, the content creator. We obeyed, for fear of not being discovered. Now what do you think happens when an AI’s datasets are trained on previously AI generated content, language use recommendations and datasets?
Sameness. Sadly. The machines want us to think just like them. And even more sinister, we have started to do so.
The Modern Day Feed
From the days of Windows ’95 dial-up modems, to taking your iPad to the toilet with you, our Internet access has gone from measured and intentional, to a 24-hour addiction. Our time is scarce, we have more to read, watch and listen to than we even have hours in the day for, and we don’t want to squander such precious time on what we’re not even looking for. Plus there’s those of us that have a wanderlust we can’t quite name, and so we let the algorithm wash over us in a dopamine induced stupor, in hopes something will give us the pleasure kick we’ve been craving after, a serendipitous “scratch” for that unknowable “itch”.
The modern “scroll” truly is a “feed” in a CAFO kind of way. It’s less “snakes and ladders” — labyrinths we need to self navigate — and more of an ouroboros, consuming and regurgitating the same formula endlessly.
But what if you don’t want to do what everyone else is doing? What if your art is unique to you, and can’t be packaged in the way everyone else does it? In a lineup of clones, how can you stand out as different without being pushed to the bottom of the pile?
Doing The Opposite
If you’re an authorpreneur, poet, artist, or content creator that wants to get noticed, but can’t stomach that sameness of it all, what should you do? The discovery engines reward the robotic formulas, the bigger the audience you have, the bigger that audience gets. If you want to be found, you had better fall in line. But if you want to maintain a shred of originality, be prepared to sink to the bottom of the sludge pile.
If you create for pure creation’s sake and don’t optimise in the way the feed recognises then you’re sure to be buried in the sands of obscurity, the sinkhole of small Substack, Medium, Insta (and insert any other feed-driven social media) hell. How can you escape the paradox?
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Here I am, once again offering a “Third Way”, a Moscanovski Manifesto for fighting the feed.
The “Third Way”: The Irresistible Lure of the Cult.
The entire logic of the feed is built on the premise of strangers being shown your content and them being lured in, over and over again. New followers each time = more followers each time = better metrics. You can of course, pay your way into such a following. I have tried this, and for the most part, it worked. But to ensure you’re able to pay your rent, eat food etc, perhaps that strategy isn’t that sustainable for each piece of media you put out. Plus paid ads, views and subs are notoriously temporary as initial interest dies off, or they’re entirely composed of vanity metrics altogether.
The Moscanovski “Third Way” reverses the entire assumption and shifts the focus. “The Third Way” is to shift the majority of your creative energy away from being found by strangers and toward being unmissable to the people who already found you once. Think Mastery of an inner circle, not catering to the masses.
Content Is the Funnel towards the Product, not the Product itself.
Email marketing, Substack, Medium articles, BMAC and Patreon pages, even Instagram and YouTube videos. These are not the earners for small creators (YouTube’s new 8,000 hours watch time rules made sure of that), but places where your audience gathers to enjoy your craft. If residual income is gained on these platforms, fine and dandy, but that is not the goal. The goal is satisfying the devoted few, or even the one, with your art.
Ritual Instead of Reach
Instead of pumping out lots of high volume pap with the same formula as everyone , put your unique voice out there, and follow a reliable, predictable posting pattern. Tell your followers that’s what you’re doing. Can you handle a high volume output, multiple posts/vids etc a week? I’m dead jel’. But better is one post every fortnight on a Friday at 4pm that your die-hards won’t want to miss, then pumping out lots of drivel that the masses click-and-bounce from because they don’t “get” your product. For those that have the patience, and do “get” it, loyalty compounds. If you can get one follower, you can get 1,000. Be consistent. Be patient. Don’t sacrifice your art. Those that love it, will pay for it.
The Machine is the Door — Not the House
By all means, use “legible” packaging — a clear title, a readable thumbnail — as a courtesy to strangers glancing in, without letting it dictate the interior. The door can look like anyone else’s door. What’s inside doesn’t have to. I’ve tried different hooks and looks etc, different marketing strategies, but I’ve made sure not to sacrifice my thing and switch niches entirely for the sake of discoverability.
“She tells two friends, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on and so on…”
Let a great, unmissable product be your referral system. The algorithm will still be rolling your stuff around in any case, it’s baked into the place, but it’s not your primary mover. Let PEOPLE be your algorithm. CTAs to “WhatsApp this to a bookworm that’d appreciate it”. A “SHARE” button, placed just at the right point of an article.
Word of mouth is the one distribution channel the machines can’t fully model, because it runs on trust, not pattern-matching.
Ask not: “How do I get discovered by everyone?” but rather, “How do I become unforgettable for someone?”
That’s it for now.
From the cult-following-flash-fiction-aficionado, pumping out prose for the privileged few- this is Moscanovski, signing off.
-END OF ESSAY-
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