Rethinking Social Media
"No matter how hard you post or what sites you do it in it’s never going to be 2019 again."
I’ve been thinking about starting to post to social media again. Instagram. YouTube. Hell, maybe even TikTok.
I know, I know.
It’s been nearly three years since I posted on a platform with any regularity. I already quit. That's supposed to be the hard part! Why would I risk getting sucked into that vortex again?
Well, I have the same problem as everyone else: a distribution problem.
Before I say more, I want to make sure we're on the same page here: what follows is glimpse of how I'm thinking about my distribution problem and potential solutions. It is not advice. It's not a recommendation. It's not even forecasting or trend-spotting.
As always, when I share how I'm thinking about something, my hope is that it might help you look at your own challenges or opportunities differently.
With that out of the way...
What do I mean by a "distribution problem?"
You have a distribution problem when the thing you make doesn't have a reliable way to get in front of the people who want it. Distribution is sort of a logistical layer that allows marketing and sales to actually work. It's helpful to think about physical goods: products are produced by one company, (often) sold wholesale to another, and then purchased by consumers in retail stores. Wholesaling is one way physical goods get access to distribution channels.
When REI places an order with a small outdoor company, that company is now distributed to over 180 stores, where loads more people will find them than would without that deal. Shifting from physical goods to the entertainment industry: when a cable company picks up a show from a production company, they've made a distribution deal that will deliver that show to many more households than if the production company had tried to distribute it themselves. And now to written media: when an author sells their book to a publisher, that publisher uses its existing relationships with bookstores to distribute that book to as many readers as possible—far more than an author could on their own.
Of course, that's not exactly how things work today. Today, you don't have to sell to REI; you can sell through your website and run ads on social media. You can launch your show on YouTube and collab with other creators to grow your audience. You can self-publish your book and work the Amazon algorithm to get it read.
Today's platform economy can make it seem like distribution is a non-issue. We conflate distribution with marketing and sales all the time because platforms seem to erase the distinctions between these practices. In fact, throughout the 2010s, it seemed like distribution was a solved problem: make media, post to platforms, get seen. Social media platforms gave us a way to distribute our ideas, designs, and expertise to a wide range of people who could follow us (or our businesses) to see more. But as that decade wore on and now in the 2020s, the mechanisms of distribution changed dramatically.
Distribution is (and has been for a while now) a problem again.
At first, the algorithms created more friction than there was when all we had were reverse chronological feeds. Media makers had to work harder and, more importantly, get luckier to have their own audiences see the media they shared, let alone people who had never heard of them. The way I overcame this was to focus on creating media people wanted to share. But then sharing as a social media practice dried up—at least as it was visible to media makers.
Then platforms shifted from a follower-based distribution system to an interest-based distribution system. This has positive and negative implications for distribution and discoverability. But by the time that rolled out, I was an old dog who was not about to learn new tricks. And I had plenty of reasons to believe I didn’t need to.
For me, social media platforms weren't a major factor in developing distribution channels, though they did help me keep the attention of audiences I found through other means. Even though my business has always functioned in the world of pixels, it was relationships that really made the difference in getting my work in front of more people.
I can trace all the career leaps I've made over the last 17 years back to a point of distribution—and none of them were social media-dependent, even if social media helped to grease the wheels. As a blogger in 2009 and 2010, I developed relationships with people who had audiences far larger than mine. They put me in front of those audiences on blogs and in newsletters. From there, I got tapped by Etsy and then CreativeLive to teach in front of their large audiences. Even my move to Substack came with a distribution boost—a former CreativeLive employee helped my newsletter get featured within the first week or two I was on the platform.
I wasn’t a savvy or skilled networker. But I was able to link together connections and opportunities that provided a solid foundation for my businesses.
Instagram was the last platform I was posting on with any sort of regularity. By the end of 2023, after moving my newsletter to Substack, I had essentially ghosted on the Gram. Substack seemed like a perfect distribution channel for me, with an audience that appreciated long-form writing, tools to connect writers, and accessible flywheel features. And at first, it was great. My newsletter was gaining new subscribers at a rate I hadn't seen since 2016.
But by the end of 2024, I was ready to leave that platform too. I didn’t leave Substack because it wasn’t working. I left because, well, for a lot of reasons. But one of them was because I wanted to be less dependent on a platform, less susceptible to the influence of an algorithm, less likely to be swept up in discursive trends. Ironically, they were some of the same reasons I moved to Substack, somewhat naïvely overlooking the fact that Substack was a platform and would inevitably exert the same forces on users that all venture-funded platforms do.
Given all this, it seems especially strange that I'd consider hopping back on one or more of the big platforms again, right?
The reason I'm thinking about trying it again is that the platforms have evolved into something I think I can participate in with greater clarity of purpose.
Rethinking Parasocial Media
In the 20th anniversary edition of the journal Social Media + Society, communications scholar danah boyd, who you might know as the person who first described “context collapse,” argued that social media is no longer social, but parasocial. boyd writes, “The practices that define social media in 2026 look extraordinarily different than the practices we were trying to document 20 years earlier. The ‘social’ in ‘social media’ has slowly become a misnomer.”
Instead of digital spaces for “co-constructing sociable spaces to enjoy the companionship of others,” social media platforms "offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations." boyd notes that social connections aren’t “assetizable,” that is, companies don’t know how to leverage them for profit. Media, on the other hand, provide focal points for value. If human connection can be packaged, even in a degraded form, into media, then companies can use those media as monetizable assets. And as McKenzie Wark has argued, the flow of those media assets through platforms creates a new, even more valuable opportunity for profit.
All that to say, I entered the social media world assuming the focus was on the social part. I consider re-entering the (para)social media world, knowing full well that the focus is on the media part.
I sincerely miss the sociality of the early web and even the early platform era. But I can't help wondering if my disposition is better suited to parasocial media.
It's not that I have an interest in becoming a celebrity or influencer. It's that I have an interest in making media and getting that media seen, heard, or read. Being “social” isn't really in my wheelhouse. I'm a bit of a hermit. But making and sharing media? No problem. Making and sharing media is how I connect with the world outside my four walls, but at a remove that is less overwhelming than socializing.
I'm also really curious about experimenting with new formats. Yes, clips. But more so, intentionally short-form media. What might I learn if I committed to creating even 3 90-second videos each week? Could I learn to say something meaningful in less than 200 words? Can I regain my ability to react thoughtfully rather than having to respond at length after careful consideration?
There are plenty of people who make remarkable short-form content. Hank Green, Jamelle Bouie, Hannah Fry... Can I figure out how to do what they do?
To be clear, I don't think the move from social media to parasocial media is a good thing.
This evolution took something that, while flawed, brought people together, gave them novel ways to interact, and provided new ways to explore our identities and transformed it into something that, as boyd puts it, “creates the conditions for people to objectify one another at a distance as mediatized objects, helping realize the different layers of toxicity that social media scholars document.” However, the shift to parasocial media makes the “game” of these platforms clearer, if not easier to play.
Towards the end of my tenure on social media platforms, I think I struggled with this transition. The shift from thinking of what I was doing as creating media designed to connect or start a conversation to thinking of what I was doing as being a creator messed with my mojo. But being a creator is actually something I'm much more comfortable with. I just needed to let go of the other mode. Three years away certainly helped with that.
Is creating media for these platforms really the key to solving my distribution problem? Probably not. The solution needs to be a new strategy, not merely a set of tactics and a willingness to play the game. The tactics are important, though, perhaps now more than ever. If I decide to do this, I will need to learn how to play the game to a degree. I'll have to relearn what works on parasocial media and wrestle with whether the trade-offs are worth it or whether it simply changes my project too much to bear.
However, the tactics need to be in service of a bigger goal and part of a guiding philosophy for how to achieve it. That's the strategy. And that I'm still working on.
Distribution—just like marketing and sales—is a part of your work, no matter what you do.
Whatever you make, whether it takes the form of pixels, audio waves, atoms, or connections, you need a way to deliver it to those you’ve made it for. If you’re part of a team, you need ways to share your work with colleagues and bosses. If you’re on your own, you need ways to connect with potential clients or customers. If you’re in organizing, you need ways to carry information and calls to action to those you hope will join your movement.
Media platforms are just one option for distribution. The right approach for you may not be digital at all. Regardless of which distribution mechanisms make the most sense for you, identifying and using them is critical. You know it’s not enough to make awesome stuff. You’ve likely learned that there’s more to marketing your thing (or yourself) than formulating the perfect message or “getting the word out.”
The “more” is likely an intentional approach to distribution. Not merely learning to play the game—the tactics—but a strategy, a philosophy even. There’s no perfect system for distribution. No strategy that doesn’t involve trade-offs. No set-it-and-forget-it approach. Distribution often means giving something up, but the upside is that people get to use the awesome thing you made.
