Tony "Highwind" Highwind

Trying to keep my posts here to 90% music and cool shit and 10% commentary about other websites, but it is so much of an active topic Right Now that it's kinda hard not to have thoughts about it.

this is kinda where i'm at, too. like at the end of the day, twitter is one game to be played out of many; there are so many ways to make money as an artist, and all you really need imo is one or two solid ones. i'm willing to give up twitter if it opens up bandwidth for other, better things.

I've found that a lot of people have genuinely brainwashed themselves into believing that if what they post can't have the potential to be shared, go viral, be expanded upon, then it defaults to useless and a waste of time.

And I have been trying to push more people to step back for three minutes and ask themselves: 'how does social media serve me?'

Because I agree with this comic so much. The people who supported me didn't support me, they supported my pain, they supported my suffering, they supported the serotonin they got from knowing 'well I would NEVER do something so awful to Vanessa!'-but then would shrink and go silent when I pointed out the largest amount of support only showed up when I was giving free education and labour but they seldom if ever supported my art, my fun posts, my streams, etc. And even when they said they would do better, more times than not it was posturing.

So I left. And I feel....more open about art, music, random musings, the works.

Really profound, thanks for sharing. The panel about the artist themselves not being the main product really resonated with me. Good luck with the album release, can't wait to hear it.

I feel this comic so much, I'm glad I put my eggs in more baskets and now I dont really feel like I'm losing 9k followers from Twitter in the same way I felt like I lost 3k followers when I lost my tumblr in 2018 and had no where else to go. I've been more active on telegram for like a year now and it's a lot more rewarding. Besides I'd rather people find my work through [furry porn website] than an algorithm that makes people scared to comment "God I wish that were me" in fear of their grandma being recommended it

I greatly appreciate this comic and how it conveys a lot of what I've been thinking and saying regarding Twitter's engagement-trend cycles (the outrage). But more importantly, I've been stewing on where the hell I can go from here, including my productivity "slowing down" because of how Twitter treats lesser-known artists versus the constant shock n' outrage.

As the comic makes the point about "being online", I feel the wisest decision here is to calm my human side down, observe where things will go, and to maintain a comfortable place for me and my work in the meantime. Cohost has even been a great place for me to learn and discover.

Some years ago I had a go at publishing erotic fiction to learn, uh, the ropes of the indie author business so to speak, 🤭 and one of my top priorities was to create a Twitter because I saw authors with 4-10K followers, which seemed like a unbelievable size of audience to me... except I quickly realised a lot of those followers were also indie authors doing the follow-for-follow thing to get 'big', and for every person whose work (or self) became a viral hit through chance or smart work there were thousands more of us who had some vague notion that by posting the perfect hook with a link to our work regularly to an audience of people doing largely the same thing we were doing something for our careers. And of course people would give up and evaporate from the scene all the time but soon enough be replaced by new people tempted by the raw numbers. I could barely bring myself to promote anything I did on Twitter after that, I felt like I'd glimpsed some eldritch horror machine that fed on human souls.

I feel like people put up with all the negativity and the time wasted scolding the Main Character of the Day and memes/sad posts/bad takes getting 1000x more engagement than their actual work because of the shiny promise of all that reach. And I wish more people realised it's... not a scam, but you do have to know how to market yourself and have a plan you stick to or you just get swept up in the tide.

The recent chaos has been a good thing for a lot of people in my opinion as it's made them face up to what life might be like after Twitter and how they might maintain the connections that actually matter to them. I guess when Twitter doesn't end up dramatically dying it will all get forgotten but I do hope there's a bit of a shift to people prioritising their own websites or mailing lists or just putting more time into their craft and not feeling like they have to be part of everything there.

I quit Twitter a number of years ago with a lot of similar concerns. My experience may not be exactly comparable since I was working as a programmer at the time, but I still got almost all of my jobs from contacts on the birdsite

And while I will say that it's been harder to stay in the know about what's happening in my field since leaving, I haven't actually found it any more difficult to get work or learn or grow ad a creator (it was always hard)....

Good luck on your album and hopefully lots of people can reclaim space for themselves and their art now!