I had my own photoblog back in the earth 2000s and participated in the early forms of SoMe like weekly shot and such. Forums were great for sharing content, ideas, and feedback. Instagram was an easy solution where lots of people moved to. It was good until FB got involved. I feel like threads is just more of the same—owned by Meta… it’s just another Avenue to allow something free and needed until it grabs a majority of interaction them they will monetize it and it’ll turn into the inevitable outcome of any third party - money and consumerism. I have my own website, but the amount of people and opportunities it has created are very minimal. I don’t know what the answer is with platforms and content submissions, but I do know I love to create and publish the content to help bring some good into a predominantly more negative environment that SoMe has evolved into.
You might enjoy the Enshittification essay by Cory Doctorow!
I have the opposite experience with having a website-- opportunities came to me through there rather than through Instagram.
Not a single company I ever worked with cared about my following there. The important point of contact and I guess proof that I'm legit was my website.
Yeah, I guess the website and upkeep is such a time consuming thing. I like to write - and kept a blog for a good long while; but just got spread too thin to put the same amount of effort into creating articles with images and such. IG was the easier—quicker option. A sentence, some hashtags, and a photo was all that was needed. Where creating content on my own website and blog turned into like 5-6 images and pages of writing with links and such to get back links and all the SEO stuff and then it turned into pushing that to get traffic and basically fighting an uphill battle against capitalist mega corporations giving free, simple tools design to reign in and create addicts and quickly consumable content… it just got exhausting to spend the effort, energy, and time to create something that would get a few comments maybe and then spammed by stupid bot comments with fake emails…
The blogging is definitely time-consuming but as with all things, you do what you love.
That photo gallery website template I made, on the other hand, was designed so posting would be effortless. I stripped it off text to lessen the friction. I want to just post photos on my gallery and I don't need to write stuff about that.
It's opposite to my blog or this publication where I spend days crafting a single post. But I only do that once a month because that's what I can manage.
I have so many questions on this I don't know where to start - or if this is the right place to ask them...
I've been playing with WordPress for a while now, and before that I had websites here and there, but I never understood the importance of RSS - honestly, I still don't. There isn't actually a question here, I know. Just a mental note to myself to learn more about it...
The way Instagram works have been bothering me for quite some time. There are some great photographers I follow, and I see their pictures less and less because I don't "interact" with them. Instead there are ads and videos I might like. So the idea of combining many platforms and reaching them from one place sounds intriguing. On the other hand, like you mentioned in the article, my whole photography presence is on Instagram. Always have been, because that's how I started toy photography.
I'm questioning myself whether I should have a separate website for it, or if I should integrate it to my existing blog page. And right now, I can't answer that. However, being stuck inside the walls you mentioned doesn't feel right.
Anyway, thank you for enlightening people like me (who has very little idea of what's going on in the virtual world :) ). You made me ask myself a lot of serious questions.
I had my own photoblog back in the earth 2000s and participated in the early forms of SoMe like weekly shot and such. Forums were great for sharing content, ideas, and feedback. Instagram was an easy solution where lots of people moved to. It was good until FB got involved. I feel like threads is just more of the same—owned by Meta… it’s just another Avenue to allow something free and needed until it grabs a majority of interaction them they will monetize it and it’ll turn into the inevitable outcome of any third party - money and consumerism. I have my own website, but the amount of people and opportunities it has created are very minimal. I don’t know what the answer is with platforms and content submissions, but I do know I love to create and publish the content to help bring some good into a predominantly more negative environment that SoMe has evolved into.
You might enjoy the Enshittification essay by Cory Doctorow!
I have the opposite experience with having a website-- opportunities came to me through there rather than through Instagram.
Not a single company I ever worked with cared about my following there. The important point of contact and I guess proof that I'm legit was my website.
Yeah, I guess the website and upkeep is such a time consuming thing. I like to write - and kept a blog for a good long while; but just got spread too thin to put the same amount of effort into creating articles with images and such. IG was the easier—quicker option. A sentence, some hashtags, and a photo was all that was needed. Where creating content on my own website and blog turned into like 5-6 images and pages of writing with links and such to get back links and all the SEO stuff and then it turned into pushing that to get traffic and basically fighting an uphill battle against capitalist mega corporations giving free, simple tools design to reign in and create addicts and quickly consumable content… it just got exhausting to spend the effort, energy, and time to create something that would get a few comments maybe and then spammed by stupid bot comments with fake emails…
The blogging is definitely time-consuming but as with all things, you do what you love.
That photo gallery website template I made, on the other hand, was designed so posting would be effortless. I stripped it off text to lessen the friction. I want to just post photos on my gallery and I don't need to write stuff about that.
It's opposite to my blog or this publication where I spend days crafting a single post. But I only do that once a month because that's what I can manage.
I have so many questions on this I don't know where to start - or if this is the right place to ask them...
I've been playing with WordPress for a while now, and before that I had websites here and there, but I never understood the importance of RSS - honestly, I still don't. There isn't actually a question here, I know. Just a mental note to myself to learn more about it...
The way Instagram works have been bothering me for quite some time. There are some great photographers I follow, and I see their pictures less and less because I don't "interact" with them. Instead there are ads and videos I might like. So the idea of combining many platforms and reaching them from one place sounds intriguing. On the other hand, like you mentioned in the article, my whole photography presence is on Instagram. Always have been, because that's how I started toy photography.
I'm questioning myself whether I should have a separate website for it, or if I should integrate it to my existing blog page. And right now, I can't answer that. However, being stuck inside the walls you mentioned doesn't feel right.
Anyway, thank you for enlightening people like me (who has very little idea of what's going on in the virtual world :) ). You made me ask myself a lot of serious questions.
Thanks for reading! Conversely, I didn't start on Instagram and so I never saw it as a photography platform. I can't take thumbnail viewing seriously.
RSS is neat but since social media, people have been using that to push out links to their sites instead.
Might as well cut out the middle man who is bad at their job anyway.