You're viewing a single thread.
I'm having this internal debate as well.
I run a blog. I write content and I'm surprised at what gets visits. But I also don't care about popularity. It's a place where I can relay information.
My friends have YouTube/twitch. They're extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job (I did not). But they're so incredibly involved in every single "drama" that every talk about coding with them ends up being about how x-person on Twitter is a jerk or how to game the system.
Seems exhausting, and I wonder if it's worth it.
Same here. At this point I've effectively become an internet 'hermit' and avoid social media. Sometimes I'd even avoid Youtube because of how overstimulating the content are. I don't know how useful this will be for my wellbeing though, since I don't even 'touch grass' either. And yes, I'm autistic so the current state of the web is borderline intolerable for me.
Good for you, I'd consider my online "diet" to be the same, although I do count lemmy and masto etc as social media, just not quite so pernicious as the mainstream corpo ones
I still like to make video content, so I post it on my self hosted PeerTube instance instead: http://tube.jeena.net
That way I'm far awaybfrom fame but also drama ^^
My friends have YouTube/twitch. They’re extremely popular, in the 100k+ range. They all quit their job
That's surprising to me. Are 100k+ really enough to make a living?
On youtube barely, on twitch for sure. Generally you would have more income streams like a patreon and some such. Maybe even merch. If you're doing it all solo, you can easily earn 4-5k per month with these numbers and that's often better than many full time jobs.
Im definitely fudging the numbers. They probably have more in other places and use all sorts of other social media platforms. And I don't really bother to verify since I start to tune them out when they go into "getting more traffic by optimizing TikTok shorts" or whatever.
Username checks out.
I'm kidding, it can be good to have friends who aren't the same as you. But seriously that sounds so TIRING. Like omfg just get a job at that point, so you can at least forget about it when you aren't working.
When I came back from winter holidays to my job I didn't remember ANYTHING. It was glorious
How do you count your visits? I don't even see whether mine has visits or not lol. I am not even sure if counting people would count as "tracking", so I am not sure whether it's acceptable in my books. The only feedback I got were a couple of emails.
I set up Google analytics on it years ago and only check for visits. Ive been meaning to switch to an open-source alternative but I'm extremely lazy on that end, since I'm not interested in monetizing.
Just turn it off. If this isn't a business then you don't need it. Free yourself :)
I remember having something parsing the apache logs and counting people. At some point I'd look at the stats several times a day ruining all the fun. I uninstalled it and now only write for myself. Couldn't be happier about it!
On that point, great article by the way! I shared it with my partner and we've been talking about it this morning. She's in comms, so for her social media has had all the joy sucked out of it long ago, and not it's just a tool.
For me the internet was a big part of my socialisation, so I miss the old, more fragmented, internet much more.
There are open source and self hosted alternatives if that's your thing.