Getting away from the algorithm

I use two social media platforms: Instagram and Threads, but I don’t need to check my screen time to know that I’ve been using Threads too much this year. It’s a place where you can have conversations. I never liked Twitter because it felt like shouting into the void. With Threads, you start to develop a community and you see how everyone interacts with each other. But that community is in Threads, and Meta does everything it can to keep you there.

I stopped posting what I wanted to post because after I got my first 10K views post, I wanted to feel that dopamine rush again. Then I had a post get 25K views, and a couple broke 60K views. If I recall correctly, in April, I had close to 375K monthly views in Threads.

Because I’d never gotten that visibility before, I started chasing the Threads algorithm because I thought I found a platform that worked for me.

Chasing The Algorithm

Once I started posting things that were gaining traction, I started deep-diving into the algorithm. What posts get more views? What posts get more engagement? What posts gain more followers? This turned into an entire content strategy: drafting posts, scheduling posts, and researching topics for future posts.

Chasing the algorithm means posting what the algorithm likes. I had stopped having fun along the way long before I realized it. I was no longer writing about things that interested me. I was reading research articles on AI to write posts, finding excuses to test tools or AI models that I didn’t need. All for... likes and views?

Even worse, sometimes, after spending time working on a post about something I enjoyed, I would post it, and it wouldn’t go anywhere, getting little to no views or engagement. Then the posts I didn’t care much about would skyrocket.

Those 375K monthly views? They didn’t produce as much as you’d think. Because Threads suppresses external links, those views translated into about 10 newsletter subscribers and relatively few visits to my blog. I do appreciate the connections I made along the way, but the numbers weren’t nearly as meaningful as they looked on the surface.

Discovering the indie web

If you’ve been following my blog, you might’ve noticed a shift earlier this month in post frequency and what I write about. That’s around the time I got tired of writing about things I didn’t care much about. I was looking for topics to blog about that were AI-adjacent and realized I was tired of writing about AI, following AI, and writing about “building on the web in the era of AI”.

I started posting less on Threads and writing more on this blog about things I wanted to write about. Out of 7 posts this month, 2 have been about AI because I enjoyed writing them. I started writing about writing, picking a niche, having a voice, and things I’ve enjoyed doing over the past few days.

This week, I discovered the Indie Web, and it’s beautiful. The core principles, from the website are:

Owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

Further below, it says:

You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you.

That resonated with me immediately. I was writing about things I didn’t care much about to try to appease an algorithm that didn’t care about me.

I don’t have to chase the algorithm.

I don’t care whether people find it.

I’m going to write it anyway.