Ethical concerns about their wishy-washy stance on AI gen aside I just saw someone jump ship to Cara from Twitter bc their work got more likes on there with less followers and i'm like
I get it on some level, it's the dopamine effect of both receiving the attention and also being able to once again flip off Musk's platform and be like "haha fuck you I don't need you anymore" but functionally, likes are worthless.
I only want to talk in cold "survival business" terms here - likes are worthless in isolation - they're a metric that can help you determine how large the audience is for your work, which is useful, but unless that audience includes CLIENTS who respond to the work with offers or contracts or can be solicited for such, they have zero material value. A platform like Cara speaks to me as having the same weaknesses that Bluesky does - it's primarily populated by people offering something to an audience (Art, writing, music, punditry, whatever) but the audience itself isn't as much in evidence. It feels like everyone hanging out in a convention hall before doors open passing around the same $20 to eachother (Which is how Bluesky felt and feels currently). That'd be fine if Cara was a purely social space like Cohost, which isn't necessarily intended to support a freelance career (I'm sorry Cohost but the tools for that just aren't here) but it's purporting to be a kind of "Lifeboat" for career artists that can replace your other platforms.
It's irritating to acknowledge it, but despite how the platform's hemorrhaged users and utility, Twitter is still where the bulk audience is and where the vast majority of (read: essentially all) my clients have ever been sourced from. I think, presently, from a pure business perspective, nowhere else has accrued the same kind of massive pool audience from every sphere. I think that can definitely change, but it hasn't yet.
I'm pathetic and mercantile, and I also don't trust any platform to protect my work from being scraped bc I don't think it's functionally possible, so for the sake of my own survival I will always run my business from the largest source audience, and if that becomes Cara somehow, I will go there, but it just isn't. I would dearly dearly love to find a place where I can fill 3-4 slots in under an hour anywhere but twitter but it just doesn't exist currently, and i'm concerned that folks burning bridges to invest in Cara are going to find it like kind of dead for actual work within a short span of time, at least for folks who rely on private freelance more than they do solicited contract work via portfolio, but like, you can store your portfolio fucking anywhere, you don't need an extra special new site to do that.
For my money, no platform that consciously describes itself as a replacement or alternative to anything is going to emerge as the "new twitter" - it's going to be whatever manages to luck into massive organic growth through capturing mainstream attention, the way TikTok did. If TikTok does get kicked out of the US I think that'll catalyze that process and we'll be looking at a platform that's both "the new Tiktok" and "The new twitter" within the next few years just bc there'll be an enormous swarm of orphaned "normie" users looking for a new place to source their info stream.
