#how to do social media marketing

[roscoehamiltons]

something about this post that merc made bothered me initially and i have figured it out after some thought. when i first saw it on my feed, i legitimately thought it was damage control and i'm not sure if it was their intention (i'm inclined to think that it is after lewis posted on his stories this morning), but whatever their intentions, to me it reads as insincere and trite. it sounds nice in theory like oh we will make the best of what little time we have together, but at the end of the day it's an empty statement. like when i see the sentence 'our journey together started 12 years we couldn't have imagined where it would take us' i would think that were would be some kind of follow up about some of those accomplishments that happened in the past 12 years. instead all we got was 'we are going to give it everything in the next 6 races 💪' like ok?? lol. i would think that they would and should be giving it everything they have whether or not someone has been on their team for 1 year or 12 years.

i am not asking for merc to post an essay about lewis' accomplishments (yet 😉) but i am asking for some effort to be put in what they are posting about lewis. there has been a lack of effort put into what the team has been posting about lewis specifically in the past 3 years, and i would not be surprised if the next post that they post about his teammate has more thought and effort put into it than the post i'm talking about. it is this discrepancy that we are seeing that is bleeding into the perceptions of the team, and how they have handled things that have happened on track and off. i will say that merc have improved in the past couple months, but it should not have taken 3 years to finally take some initiative. they shouldn't need people to remind and harass them into posting about lewis' accomplishments and milestones. i should not be writing a rant about how i want more than a couple sentences written about lewis' last 6 races at mercedes. they should and need to do better. i would hope that no one would call me unfair or crazy by saying this or criticizing them. but at the end of the day, it is their job and they have failed at their job, and we are seeing the consequences of it now with how badly the relationship between the fans and the team has gotten.

[theflyingfeeling]

I think today I will cry about BC not making tour vlogs anymore 😔

[equalseleventhirds]

it is so late and i am so tired and i haven't even been online much lately, but i've been ruminating abt ttrpgs (as i have endless rumination time at work and on the train, which is 80% of my time anyway)

and abt the like, unreasonable mindset ppl get into abt dnd 5e due to Marketing and also Actual Plays. u kno, that it can Do Anything, that u don't gotta know the rules, that the dm should plan a conventional narrative and u gotta stick to it, that it's for cute queer found families, roleplaying rollplaying bullshit, etc.

and sometimes there's posts from ppl who are outside of that mindset like, wow try another game, but also pls don't bring that mindset to other games we love. u kno.

and maybe i simply spend a lot of time in podcast & streaming circles and also circles of ppl who learned ttrpgs from podcasts & streaming, but, crucially, i don't play d&d

so i meet a lot of ppl who have moved past d&d, right. but. still have that mindset abt their new favorite game(s).

like, 'oh unlike d&d this is actually a queer found family narrative' they say abt a heavily pvp game where u can be queer but it's not about queerness.

'oh unlike d&d you can create a real story' they say, as the gm ignores the handy Make Situations sheet the game comes with and plans a 5-act narrative years in advance.

'oh unlike d&d this game is about ROLEplaying not ROLLplaying' they say, ignoring the social mechanics of the game in order to draw out talky scenes. for character work. for realism. for the story.

'oh unlike d&d this one is so easy to learn' they say, not reading huge and relevant sections of the book until halfway through the session.

i could go on. once i played a kinda weird and poetic indie game with folks whose primary game was motw, and the amount of 'hey this weird and poetic mechanic doesn't make literal sense to me as a character action' haunts me.

and it is immensely frustrating, bcos like.... on the one hand, god i'm glad you're playing something that's not d&d!! that's so important!! on the other hand, you likely learned about this game through an actual play where they (hopefully) used the basic mechanics for stuff, but mostly ran the story like a 5e actual play.

like, i love the adventure zone, but my god you're gonna come out of amnesty or steeplechase with a WILD misunderstanding of the themes and story even a lot of the mechanics of motw or bitd. (both games i like very much. but don't play them like the mcelroys.) or like, god i'm glad the d20 folks are having such fun with kob-adjacent games. but do NOT learn kob from them.

and listening to famous ppl do that to a game i like is one thing. a frustrating thing, to be sure. but participating in a game like this, or even hearing my friends & acquaintances play like this? hateful. makes me grit my teeth and cry. makes me make weirder and weirder game mechanics, which hopefully i'll make into coherent games someday.

anyway, this is all to say, before you start your found family motw game where u will team up with the monsters to save everything and maybe also bigfoot is there, a. stop listening to taz amnesty, b. read, really REALLY read apocalypse world and get a handle on THAT, c. go reread motw and think hard abt it, and d. watch buffy and supernatural a bit. yeah i know they suck. think rly hard abt that scene in buffy where xander chooses not to tell buffy that angel will get his soul back so buffy has to kill her and then no one ever finds out abt that and i HATE that scene but also it's the kind of thing motw was built for, you see.

also play weirder games and adjust ur expectations but whatever.

[anchorandrope]

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[keydekyie]

let's be real for a second, being on social media is soooo so bad for you, and yet! it's the thing all artists/writers/creatives are supposed to constantly engaging with in order to "grow your audience" and "market yourself"

but it's poison! it's poison! I'm never less creative than when I've been active on social media!

What is the solution??? idk, but if you're ever out there wondering how the hell anyone gets any fucking thing done EVER in this stupid social-media-saturated age, then know you're not alone, dammit.

Because I don't fucking know either.

[zerodaryls]

note to self: you do not like social media

this was my final post on my (short-lived) art insta. i just can't with that fucking app. as a high masking autistic person, video/image-based apps like instagram and tiktok just reinforce that whole "Life Is A Constant Performance" thing that already consumes every moment of my waking life. (for me, personally. obvs if you find value in social media, do what u want forever, ily, live ur best life.)

i recognize that many artists (and particularly marginalized creators) often have to use social media to grow their business and increase their chances of earning income. and, as someone with friends and family spread all around the world, it can be the best way to keep in touch with people i care about. but being active, especially as an artist, on any "social" app (besides tumblr... if you can call tumblr a social app) is just not a tradeoff that i can personally sustain.

so,, if i make art i feel is worth sharing, it'll be here from now on. and, y'know, redbubble. because i'm a brokeass bitch. (wanna buy a sticker to support a queer/trans/AuDHD artist? [see all my sticker designs here!])

[wavetapper]

not taking a stance bc I do not give a shit but it's interesting that when people say their favourite movie is a kids movie that's not weird, or when their favourite video game is a kids game that's also not weird, but when it's a book (or even a show tbh) it's treated like a sign of the declining intellect of the general population

[cridhe]

why the fuck have they censored the word 'killed' on a real life sheet of paper at an actual fucking protest??? hello???

[mishkakagehishka]

Idc anymore i think i'm a good enough writer that i can say that when i noticed the pattern in what exactly makes a book "good" on booktok (and, bc of that, what makes it popular and top bestseller lists), it feels almost demeaning and denigrating to the entire craft. Idk if i should blame the way tiktok-esque social media has utterly rotted everyone's ability to concentrate and read more than three sentences, but literally none of those books are objectively good.

(Yes, yes, art is subjective. HOWEVER. Art is subjective when you look at style, at themes, at motifs, at plots and characters. Art is still a craft, it still requires skill. I've seen beyond the tiktok quotes of these books. Not even their editors are good given the amount of typos/spelling mistakes. That is not something that you should find in a traditionally published book.)

You look at these books, and you know the only reason for their existence is to make money. I cannot and will not accept that as art.

(I'm on Tumblr, of course I have to explain every point. Artists who make money off their art =/= people who only create art meant to be profitable. There is a difference between an artist who hopes to monetise doing what they love, who creates what they wish to see more of and who happens to then create something that other people wish to see more of, and a person who looks at what's trending and decides that making an unholy frankenstein's monster of a book that mashes all those trending tropes and motifs together would get them rich quick. The fact that a lot of these booktok books become popular because of nepotism is just the cherry on top. It's soulless.)

And to finally say what I wanted to say, it's because none of these books have any deeper message or even artistic value to them. You will find a few out of context quotes or paragraphs, ones written specifically so they'd look deep and beautiful when taken out of context, so that people would post them, so that people would buy the books. Entire books written just so those few lines could become viral and make cash. It cannot even be compared to a hook line writers would post to get people interested in their works, because in booktok's case, those are the only lines of quality and in the context itself, they are often out of place and forced.

I just hate booktok, i hate what modern social media has done to art. It's all created to be quickly consumed, for the few ☆aesthetic☆ glances, and then discarded. Just to make more money for those who are already nepo babies. As if artists needed more obstacles to jump over.

[diviineloser]

whoops guess who popped off in the group chat after someone said they weren’t talented enough to do art. girl stfu u don’t need talent to do art all u need is the will the create and the determination to make it happen. it doesn’t need to be ‘good’ to be art it just has to fucking be.

[zorasapphires]

why did no loop reviews mention sensory discomfort of having things in your ears and hearing your own breathing/movements so loudly :(

[rewritingcanon]

trying not to think about how the publishing market in australia is dead for fantasy novels and to get sales i should submit the manuscript to a british/american agent but if thats the case what the fuck is the point of me doing uni in aus and trying to network and if it gets good sales on the other side of the world how the fuck am i even gonna interact with it or help promote it when i live in AUSTRALIA

[zhengzi]

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[songofsaraneth]

i'll be honest i do not trust any up&coming social media site that claims it will be free to use and also not sell your data and also have zero ads. WHERE are you getting money then? like sure you can rely on donations for sustainability for like... a couple years at best probably, if you're aiming to wildly increase growth/number of users. donation based works ok for small highly invested communities or for online repositories of data (wikipedia, ao3). but like facebook/instagram/tiktok are profitable becuase they harvest data and use ads. tumblr is BARELY scraping by because it only relies on ads. if you take away even that, as soon as you have enough users to surpass the limits of free hosting, you're operating at a deficit.

like not writing this to say don't give it a shot, sincerely wish them good luck and hope they figure it out, it's hard! but also i just don't consider those kinds of websites/communities a reliable "backup" plan compared to tumblr itself which has kept chugging along for years despite Everything. it's a shiny new social media but it is weird to profess that a social media site advertising NO revenue streams will last longer than this one here.

[sweet-as-kiwis]

Plus side to having a boring class that only meets once a week: I only have to sit through two hours of Bullshit once

Downsides: I FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT THE CLASS IT STARTED 40 MINUTES AGO FUCK

[foolishfalls]

watching the internet burn down in real-time feels kind of insane to my chronically online mind. i spent my formative years on this site. it influenced me a lot for better or worse and i'm glad i was able to grow and experience more than this but it also sucks that the internet just really isn't the same separate world of escapism and media it used to be it's just another place for us to be sold things now and another thing to distract us and take up our time.