I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…
In my current job I’m running a 200k+ subscribers newsletter and a quite successful podcast. I had my own social presence since around 2004 with varying degrees of success. I really don’t care for the numbers and I never in earnest tried to make a living solely off my social presence. So I never tried “growth hacking” or took deliberate steps to reach millions. I use social media as a channel out, a scratchpad to note down ideas and experiments and invite other people to comment and together create better solutions, share information and joy. Social media to me always meant humans writing things as they wanted to tell the world about them.
Two things that gave me quite some reach over the years have never changed though: it’s important to post a lot and in a reliable cadence and it’s important to have a voice and take a stand, voice an opinion.
Whilst collecting tools to cover in our newsletter, I came across one service that annoys the hell out of me.
AI Social Media Writing Assistant for LinkedIn, Twitter & 6 More Platforms
Your AI reputation coach that learns your voice, reads your feeds, and tells you exactly where to show up, then writes comments and posts that sound like you, drawing from your real stories and experience.
Excellent, isn’t it? Instead of having to do all the reading, thinking or creating you point a machine to the things you did in the past and make it appear as you. And not just for posting, also for commenting and interacting with probably people but more likely other bots. We automate away the human or social part, trading it for growth and numbers.
The speed in which highly successful people publish huge treaties and books lately makes me understand that tools like that are pretty widespread and used. I do get about 10 emails a day offering AI tools that automate my job as developer relations leader.
The thing is that I don’t want that. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m part of a conversation and available for advice when I’m clearly not. I don’t want to publish for the sake of having published at a certain time or in a thread that causes lots of comments.
Social media has become a toxic rage bait machine with the companies that run it clearly being ok with this. I really would love people to call out more when others are obviously replaced by automation and to tell the platforms to bugger off when they ask you to create more content geared towards interaction rather than information.
I remember a long time ago foursquare was a social thing to do. You checked in at a place to show that you’re there and ready to interact with people and meet contacts.
I was at an event that time and bummed out as my flight to the office was early and I couldn’t attend the party with networking booths. So I told another speaker that this is a shame and his answer was to go past the venue on the way to the airport and check in on Foursquare so people thought you’ve been there and it was their fault for not finding you. I lost a ton of respect for that person on that day.
As an actor or author you don’t send your body or stunt double to attend interviews or sell autographs at comic con. Don’t create a virtual double that posts for you on social media when you can’t be arsed or feel overwhelmed. Take that overwhelming feeling and write about it, showing the world that your mental health is as fragile as the one of the people who follow you and read your work. Be human and only there when you can be there.
