I don’t know how to be popular, and that hurts in a social world

I was a terribly naive child. I was out of touch with social reality.

As my family moved from city to city, I was never among the popular kids at any school. I told myself it was because I was always the new kid everywhere, but some part of me knew better. Some of my peers always had something that made others like them. I seemed to rub people the wrong way — and I never knew why.

Despite this, I expected to be a leader. I knew I was smart and I was able to do things that few of my classmates could do. I thought that would take me far in this world. My childhood goal — a very serious one — was to be elected president of the United States.

As a teen, I had leadership roles at school and at church, but it wasn’t because my peers liked me. It was simply because I knew how to get things done. And when push came to shove, I was handed power and leadership when things needed to get done. But it didn’t make me popular. And I knew that.

I’m decades beyond those confused early expectations, but a part of me has never escaped them. I thought when I became an adult, competence would matter. Nothing else. Sometimes it did, but I often still can rub people the wrong way. Even when I knew how to be popular, I didn’t want to be.

And now I realize that I’m doomed to failure in the media world if I rely on popularity that comes from social media. Whatever it is that social media wants from a man, I don’t have it. And that means I have to make some changes.

I first joined Facebook years ago because a girlfriend asked me to. I didn’t see the point. But after I started publishing this website 12 years ago, I discovered that social media was the new way to become known. We were supposed to “connect” with our “followers” and “friends.”

So I played that game for a few years. I pandered to an audience. I wrote what they wanted to hear. I collected “friends” on Facebook the way sugar water catches flies. I soon had 5,000 “friends” — the limit for a personal account — and I promoted my links. Facebook’s algorithm at the time still made that easy — and I soon had thousands of readers every day. It wasn’t a huge audience, but I saw it as a platform on which I could build something bigger.

But I eventually rebelled against what I was doing. I couldn’t just keep pandering to readers by telling them what I knew they already agreed with. That seemed pointless. So I quit doing it.

I stopped writing about politics. I slowly deleted or blocked most of the fake friends I had collected. (I’m down to about 450 now and that still seems like too many.) And as I’ve started the new YouTube show, it’s suddenly dawned on me that I can no longer count on social media to build an audience for me.

Part of that is because I don’t want to play the role that social media wants us to play. I challenge people’s ideas instead of saying what I know they’ll agree with. When I do agree with most people, I rarely find it worth talking about, because what’s the point of saying what other people are already saying?

When I started the YouTube show, there was still a part of me which naively believed I could use social media to build some popularity, just as I did a decade ago. But I’ve realized that social media has changed — and I’ve changed, too.

Social media today is more about “social” and less about anything that I consider to be “media.”

It’s the online equivalent of middle school. The generic content which is posted is just filler to reflect the social status of the users. A socially popular person’s low-quality content is going to be more popular than thoughtful content from someone without social status. I’ve known this for a long time and it’s annoyed me, but I’m having to change my thinking.

For a long time, I thought this was just a flaw in the way social media worked. But I finally realize this isn’t a bug. It’s designed that way, because the platforms care only about engagement, not about good content finding an audience. As long as people are engaging — happily chatting or sharing recipes or arguing about idiotic beliefs — the social media platform makes money.

There is no social media platform which is in business to help me build my own business. I can either be popular by the shallow and idiotic standards of a dumbed-down system or else I’m going to be more and more marginalized on such a platform. And now that I understand this, I also understand that I have to find ways to build a media brand without the help of social media.

I don’t fit into what the social media algorithms want today, so I can’t help those companies become more profitable. Therefore, I’m useless to them, which means I would be an idiot to put my success at their mercy.

In some ways, I’m still a naive child. I still have the naive belief that competence and reason and decency matter. But if I want to play a game where those things are valued, I have to build an audience in a way that doesn’t require me to pander to a base-level popularity that I’ll never be capable of.

I’m never really going to be the popular kid. I’m always going to rub some people the wrong way. But there is an audience out there — somewhere — that would value what I know how to make. I need to find that audience.

That starts with admitting that social media is no longer the way for someone like me to build an audience. I’m not making a show to find shallow popularity. I’m making a show for you.