I QUIT: Giving up on social media instead of giving up on myself

Is starting a Substack the digital creator's version of going off-grid? Let's find out.

Late last year, I finally let myself accept something that I’d been diligently ignoring for a long time: I was burned out.

I was tired and frustrated, uninspired and discouraged. After a year of back-to-back-to-back disappointments, I found myself constantly questioning The Point™. 

Why, I wondered as I refreshed by email for the nth time in the first few hours of my day, had I spent so much time trying so damn hard if all that effort wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go? 

When, I pondered while trapped in the cycle of mindlessly opening, closing, and re-opening the same three social media apps in quick succession, had making things stopped being fun? 

What, I asked of my journal pages in one entry after another, was The Point™ of giving so much of myself creatively if it wasn’t making me happy?

As someone who’s been making stuff—writing stories, drawing pictures, you know the drill—my entire life, these questions and feelings were scary. I didn’t like that I was doubting myself and the things I loved. Somehow, some way, I knew I needed to get to the bottom of what was wrong.

I was at least self-aware enough to know that social media (and more specifically, the sense of validation that we seek from it) was a big part of the problem. Artists and other content creators have been raging against the algorithm for a long time now, but over the last year it felt like things got a lot worse. Seemingly overnight, my engagement took an alarming nose-dive. The only comfort I took was in the fact that it seemed to be happening to all of us. I watched as my peers pulled out all the stops to claw their way back into the algorithm’s good graces. Make more Reels, post more often, beg our followers to turn on notifications and, for the love of all that’s good in this world, do not forget to save, like, comment, and follow! It got to a point where I felt like we were spending more time trying to convince the algorithm that we deserved the audiences we’d worked so hard to grow than actually making our art.

Then came the Great Follower Exodus of 2022. It didn’t seem to matter how much or how little I posted, I was (and still am) losing followers constantly. I lose them when I don’t post, and I lose them when I do. More than baffling, it was extremely discouraging. It’s hard to feel motivated to create new work when you know the simple act of sharing it is just going to chip away at your audience. 

I decided to take a step back for a little bit. I needed to reassess.

I was bitching about all of this to my spouse over the holidays. We were out walking the dogs, and I had worked myself into a self-righteous tantrum, lamenting loudly about how Instagram is pathetic for trying to make itself more like TikTok and how unjust it is that the algorithms on virtually every platform systematically inhibit users’ reach.

“Listen — I’m not going to tell you that this isn’t an algorithm’s fault, because it is,” my spouse said once my tirade was over. “But keep in mind that these algorithms work that way for a reason. Apps aren’t trying to get people to use them a certain way; they’re trying to stay relevant by keeping up with how people are using them, and the way people use social media is changing.”

If you’re annoyed by that response, I won’t hold it against you. My first instinct was to be pissed. But given that my spouse has spent their entire career in digital marketing, I had to accept the fact that they probably know what they’re talking about.

Of course the way we use social media is changing. The Tiktok-ification of how we consume content was bound to spill over into other spaces; the way we swipe through our feeds so rapidly that we barely register what we’re seeing. This has led to a “spray and pray” approach to content, in which creators focus on quantity to increase the odds that something, anything will land with users. And, as much as we complain about having posts from users we don’t follow “suggested” to us in our feeds, the FYP model has conditioned us to expect content to find us instead of the other way around. Our collective attention span is forever shrinking, while our appetite for new content remains insatiable. Whether we realize it or not, the apps are just giving us what we want. Because as long as we get what we want, we stay. And as long as we stay, they get paid. Capitalism!

This conversation was a tipping point for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about spending hours on a drawing, days or weeks on a comic, months or years on a story… just for someone to scroll past it without a second thought because it didn’t stand out among the myriad of other posts on their feed.

And don’t even get me started about how these apps are making their money off of the content we create. We spend countless hours creating content for platforms that generate revenue from the eyeballs our work attracts, but they won’t make improvements that benefit us. These apps have us jumping through hoops; the more we scramble to get the attention of our intentionally suppressed audiences, the more money they make off of our desperation. It’s pretty fucking gross.

I don’t want this. 

I don’t want to have to make videos and post multiple times a day just to maybe (maybe!) reach more of my audience. I don’t want what I create to be dictated by apps and algorithms and trends. I don’t want to keep running myself into the ground trying to play a game that, by design, can’t be won.

What I want is to fall in love with creating again. 

I want to write the stories and create the art that makes me happy, not just the stuff I think will win me some meaningless internet popularity contest. I want to share that work with people who are willing to take the time to consume it thoughtfully. I’d rather have a small but dedicated audience than waste another second chasing likes and followers.

So, that’s what I’m going to do.

Moving forward, I’ll be posting all of my new art, comics, tutorials, essays, and updates on Substack (my stories will continue to be posted on Wattpad). If you want to stay up-to-date with my work, all you need to do is subscribe and my posts will be delivered to your inbox — no need to sign up for a new app or go to another website.

All of these posts will be available for free. If you do choose to pay for a subscription, you’ll receive free merch, first dibs on commission slots, and exclusive commission and shop discounts as tokens of my gratitude.

My Ko-Fi memberships will retire at the end of January, but my account will remain active for one-off donations. I’ll also continue to use Ko-Fi to facilitate my commissions (which are now open) and my merch shop (which will be updated with a bunch of new items in the coming weeks). 

I am endlessly grateful to everyone who supported me by subscribing to a membership tier. It means more to me than I can say that you believed in me and my work enough to spend your hard-earned money on me. I know it’s not much, but I’ll be sending you all exclusive discount codes before I retire the tiers to thank you for your patronage.

I’m going to keep using Instagram stories the way I already do, because it’s fun. And, while I don’t anticipate updating my main feed very often, I still want to engage with the people I follow because that’s the point!

Finally, as a member of the Wattpad Creators program, I’ll still be posting new chapters of Starborn Legacy on my profile each week. And yes, Serve And Protect is coming back eventually too.

I realize that this probably seems like a strange move, and if you don’t care to subscribe to my Substack that’s totally fine! Still, I’m looking forward to getting back to what I love: creating the art and stories that my heart craves. I’d be honoured to share them with you, and I appreciate you no matter what. 

x,
M

tl;dr: In an effort to reclaim my creative energy I’m abandoning social media, retiring my Ko-Fi memberships, and moving to Substack.