Your devotion to the algorithm is depressing me

This morning I was on Twitter and I saw that an artist had released a new song. Everyone was retweeting it with phrases like “it’s so obvious they made this for tiktok” and “this mfer really made a tiktok song” and it hit me - I am so depressed by this ideology.

I remember talking to someone a few months ago who works in social media. He was telling me that every time he makes a tweet, he posts it to Instagram, and then makes a TikTok green screen video of his face in front of his tweet, pointing at it.

“Why?” I had asked.

“For engagement. It’s great to multi-purpose your content on different platforms.”

Oh. Oh, I’m so incredibly bummed out by that.

I remember a coworker a few years ago who wanted to start affiliate marketing. She had found out that I was “big” on TikTok and asked me out to coffee to “pick my brain” on social media.

“How did you get all of your followers?” she asked.

“Well, honestly I didn’t have as much when I was just making videos about like, dating in New York and being obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein case. But then I started talking about blind items on TikTok and I think Gen Z wasn’t as familiar with them back then so-”

“So that’s what I should do? Make blind item videos?”

“What? No. I mean, what content are you interested in? What do you like to talk about?”

“I’ll talk about anything really, I just want to be able to get a few thousands followers this month.”

I’m so bummed by you. You’re bumming me out.

I’m so bummed by all of this! I miss the days of scrolling Thought Catalog and Man Repeller and reading blogs that reminded me of my own diary entries. I’m so sick of everything being sponsored and made for the algorithm and having a catchy “hook” it makes me want to vomit and die.

“Use this trending sound” and people crowning the Wes Anderson trend as this super original, creative thing when it’s a fucking trend. And my conspiracy mindset believes that it’s someone on Wes Anderson’s payroll who guerilla started it because I’m sure people are watching more Wes Anderson movies since it started and also his next movie is coming out this June. So…original? No, I don’t think so. Sadly, originality online is getting harder and harder to find.

And look, I’m a bit of a culprit of this as well. I did only rise to “known” levels online because I niched down and talked about celebrity gossip.

My original love has always been this blog. Ironically enough, after I got to “known” levels online I archived about 95% of the posts on here because I was afraid of them being misinterpreted haha.

But I love original thoughts. I love people coming to their own conclusions and not spouting out things they’ve seen online.

I was grabbing dinner with some new friends a couple months ago and they were telling me about this theory they had about a new celebrity couple. I asked a question about their theory and they paused and went “oh, I actually don’t know - it’s not my theory, I saw a TikTok video about it”

You’re bumming me out! Massively!

ChatGPT and these writer layoffs and reading blog posts online that I can just tell in my bones were written by AI, and SEO optimized with headings so they came up on the first page of Google.

I don’t know why I’m taking it so personally - but it feels personal. The internet used to be a fascinating place, one where I truly felt like I could learn and explore and meet new people, and now it’s just…it feels fake. It feels phony.

I subscribe to the dead internet theory more and more every day. (We covered this on Patreon).

I will say - it’s not all bad.

Niching down and growing an audience has allowed me to now be able to talk about things I really do love with people who are interested in the same topics. Aliens in the ocean. Why we pit female celebrities against each other. Sex trafficking and how social media sites don’t do enough to combat this. We get to talk about celebrity gossip on FluentlyForward, but also a host of semi-adjacent topics (okay, the aliens one wasn’t even semi-adjacent, but still).

And there’s our Patreon book clubs we do. Our Discord channel where people can chat with each other and I can lurk on fun, organic conversations happening.

It’s just that the internet used to feel like a flourishing place where everything on there was raw, unfiltered, and only put out into the world because it had to be expressed.

And now people make TikTok videos stocking their fridge with plastic containers on Amazon (storefront linked in bio!) and it just…depresses me.

It’s not all bad out there. (At least, until ChatGPT becomes sentient and takes over). But it’s getting gloomy.

Who knows. I dream some days of creating FluentlyForward as a media company - hiring people to write about and make content in different beats, and creating some sort of Man Repeller-ish website, or app, or place where people can experience that same feeling of the old internet. I miss it.