{"id":37142,"date":"2023-05-29T01:28:42","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T06:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=37142"},"modified":"2023-05-29T01:28:42","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T06:28:42","slug":"i-dont-know-how-to-be-popular-and-that-hurts-in-a-social-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=37142","title":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t know how to be popular, and that hurts in a social world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was a terribly naive child. I was out of touch with social reality.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and I never knew why.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 a very serious one \u2014 was to be elected president of the United States.<\/p>\n

As a teen, I had leadership roles at school and at church, but it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t make me popular. And I knew that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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<\/em> to be popular, I didn\u2019t want to be.<\/p>\n

And now I realize that I\u2019m 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\u2019t have it. And that means I have to make some changes.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, it’s suddenly dawned on me that I can no longer count on social media to build an audience for me.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and I’ve changed, too.<\/p>\n

Social media today is more about \u201csocial\u201d and less about anything that I consider to be \u201cmedia.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

For a long time, I thought this was just a flaw in the way social media worked. But I finally realize this isn\u2019t a bug. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-9F4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37142"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37147,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37142\/revisions\/37147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}