I have noticed over the last year or so a a cadre of people in the photo-art end of things who have expressed dis-satisfaction with social media, complaining about "the algorithm" and, mostly, starting newsletters in response. How this is supposed to help is unclear.

1/

Among the, I suppose many, common traits here is that they use social media wrong.

These blokes (they're all blokes) seem to think that social media works the same for them as for Taylor Swift.

They create an account, follow a couple people, drop a few pearls of wisdom...

2/

... and get no traction. The don't interact with anyone. Occasionally they will retweet someone they perceive as higher up the food chain, in what appears to be an ass-kissing gesture, but that's about it.

3/

You, middle-aged white dude with an adjunct position at the university of southern north dakota at Hoople, are not Taylor Swift. You cannot just post "I farted" and get 150,000 retweets in 60 seconds.

4/

It works differently for you than for Tay. You have to work at it (Tay works hard for it too, but her hard work is in the studio and on stage, not on twitter).

Engage, you dopes. Yeah, you followed 1000 people and got 989 follow-backs.

5/

And all the people who are even lower down the food chain than you followed you trying to get a follow-back, and because they hope you'll, somehow, help them out. So you have 1500 followers, or 10,000, but no engagement.

6/

You have no engagement because you don't engage. You ask questions and ignore the answers (unless it's from one of your ass-kissing targets), you ignore any attempt to start a dialog.

7/

Maybe you "like" an occasional reply that is sufficiently abject and content-free agreement, but that's about it.

Social media says "social" right in the name, guys. It's not the algorithm, it's you.

fin/