Ever since the advent of social networks, becoming famous for posting has never been easier. However, posting professionally in order to promote a business has been anything but straightforward or easy. As a small green software business owner of Sprocket Bicycle Marketplace and a former designer who’s worked at companies such as

,

,

I thought it would be important to go through why social media sucks for business owners today and maybe point it in some directions where it can be improved.

Who I am online:

Sprocket Bicycle Marketplace App
Instagram @sprocketblog — 7500 ( started in 2014 and posting daily this is my oldest account and very likely the oldest daily posting account on the platform )
Tumblr @sprocketapp — 1300
Josh @sprocket — 850 (New!)
Facebook @sprocketapp — 300
YouTube @sprocket — 100
LinkedIn @Retrographic — 100
Twitter @sprocketblog — 100
Pinterest @sprocketapp — 50
Strava @Sprocket — 50
Reddit @r/sprocketapp — 3 (New!)
Medium @

— 3
Dribbble @Retrographic — 0
Nextdoor @Retrographic — 0 (New!)

Personal
LinkedIn @7Shurygin — 1400
Twitter @SE_777777_EN — 1200
Facebook @shurygin — 500
Dribbble @sevenshurygin — 450
YouTube @nukeout — 100
Instagram @nukeout — 100
Medium @

–100 <you are here>
Vimeo @seven — 0 (New!)

As you can see all together that puts me over 10K followers overall and into the realm of whats called a micro-influencer. Although a lot of these accounts are special-purpose like Dribbble ( which is a professional design network ) and LinkedIn ( which started as a professional jobs network turned social network sometime around the

acquisition ). A few accounts grew automatically like

because it still has a repost integration with

so all 3000 posts I’ve made of the years have grown me followers there as well. For Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter for many years I had an auto-resharing integration going via IFTTT (IF THIS THEN THAT) which reposted my daily Instagram posts to them. I didnt even know it was doing anything at all until I started getting recognized as “The LinkedIn Bicycle Guy” on Silicon Valley public transit and bicycle rides! Unfortunately as with all good things that work correctly in corporate America, LinkedIn disconnected IFTTT, Pinterest apparently forgot why they had IFTTT and then Elon swept in and just broke most of Twitter in General ( The IFTTT integration works as of the time of this writing but the platform itself has become an unstable cesspool of insurrectionist rhetoric and I wouldnt be surprised if things break at any moment )

This is Josh, the Indian equivalent of xi’s TikTok

Overall my mornings are spent on social every day. It takes about 30 min to find a bicycle photo from my phone, research, watermark and post it to Instagram ( from which it automatically gets reshared to the aftermentioned Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr ) If im doing an IG post of a bicycle for sale on my platform it takes an additional couple minutes to set up the Facebook Catalog version and connect it up to its twin IG post via desktop so the link passes traffic through to my platform. If im doing a personal 15s reel/short/josh that also takes about 30–60 min a day. I plan what Im going to cover during my morning walk, go out and shoot a couple takes. I then edit the length down to 15s for Josh/YouTube/Instagram + Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/Nextdoor/Tumblr/Strava/Reddit/Vimeo ( with music only usually added to Instagram ) Music presents a particular problem because its not addable on many platforms I need it on like LinkedIn and it overrides whatever audio of me talking on YouTube and Josh ( as of this writing ), in addition to copyright laws I cant ( or am not sure that I can ) upload the downloaded Instagram cut everywhere else. I also get the Instagram watermark on Instagram-downloaded reels, so have yet to investigate if that counts against me in any way.

Two things that immediately jump out from all this work are that the platforms are often proprietary and therefore not indexed by Google/Bing or any of the new AI systems such as ChatGPT/Bing and that the platforms are proprietary so things need to be manually uploaded/connected up to each every freakin’ day. I sort of understand why Web 2.0 platforms were engineered by VC-backed corporations for maximization of ‘shareholder value’ but at the same time it means that the reach of what you post is not internet-wide but only platform-wide. How reach works and/or does not work, is also at the mercy of your overlord gatekeepers who can turn it on/off for whatever reason they choose and erect pay-to-play barriers via “advertising” and other monetization schemes. With my experience photo-blogging on Instagram for example, I got up to 5K followers before reach was clamped down on in favor for paying for the same by “advertising” instead. Same thing happened with photos when the tables were turned by

who decided that in order to compete with communist TikTok only videos matter and flipped the tables on me — entirely negating 9 years of posts! I did manage to post a reel that got +4m views and 2K followers brining me up to the current 7.5K. Its just the matter of the business in which youre treated as a peasant who is subject to the arbitrary laws of a kingdom insulated from the open-and-predictable democracy of the public internet. Even Google is not immune to this; as their centralized policies seem to be against the channels who disseminate information about the communist party on YouTube. Internally what seems to be happening is a cascade failure of recruiting to vet agents of the communist dictatorship of China — and internally of HR being unable to effectively root them out and fire them for pushing an anti-American anti-democracy agenda.

Being threatened for account termination here for highlighting China giving weapons to putin’s Russia which is accused by the Hauge of Crimes Against Humanity #fun

When it comes to platforms of any kind theres the additional risk of deplatforming. Lets say that everything is great and that, like me, you do choose to invest a decade of your life posting every day. Your account can still be nuked for any reason, no reason, by accident or because the policies changed. Again, YouTube is a great example because at one point they were destroying accounts for posting hearts repeatedly in lifestreams ( which the algorithm had mistakenly thought were spam ) but where in effect the platform was accidentally deleting peoples main Gmail inboxes, Drive files and access to all sorts of critical information secured with their gmail — such as irrecoverable Play Store / App Store developer accounts! This happens to every platform including Uber/Lyft and it all comes down to the nature of how the business/legal/tech is structured. Web 2.0 businesses are structured as private corporations that are liable for the content on their platforms and were blitzkrieged by VCs to achieve maximal size without investing in great customer support or capacity to deal with the firehose of stuff happening on their platforms. Its almost mandatory at some scale to have automated moderation — which can fail, or with even manual moderation simply ban accounts at the first sign of trouble because there are so many accounts overal that a person becomes reduced to a number. However for real human beings who get bann-hammered accidentaly and who may have chosen to erroneously invest a lot in their account or depend on it for income/business this is an extraordinarily big deal!

What is to be done?

I believe Jack Dorsey ( formerly founder of Twitter ) developing Bluesky, the guys behind the ActivityPub protocol ( which can already connect to Tumblr and Mastadon ) and Vitalik Buterin ( co-founder of Ethereum ) have already figured out the solution. In the future the social network platforms will create trust with accounts on the Ethereum ( or similar ) smart contract blockchain, rather than create proprietary kingdoms. Account holders will have their accounts on a separate decentralized ( yet intercompatible platform ) such as ActivityPub which will interface with these networks. This will mean that you the human, will be in charge of your account, your data and your avatar across all the platforms you choose to connect to. It will mean that in a more object-orientated sense a platform will be able to bar you from connecting to it rather than simply striking down your digital identity and metaphorically killing you at its whims or due to error. Most exciting of all is that most social networks share standardized media; text, images, videos, audio which are already being coded onto various blockchains. In essence your social media posts will become NFTs authenticated by your decentralized account — and which will automatically be compatible with all social networks that operate on that same blockchain ( and any intercompatible protocols ). So to say it simply, you’ll be able to upload the same video instantly to all the social networks compatible with the format for “Ethereum Video Posts” instead of opening up separate accounts on each network and manually uploading the same video over and over to a proprietary database!

The future is bright for social networks which will be rebuilt like legos on public blockchains. As many have said the open internet should be treated more so like a public utility that hosts many social goods than as something to be gated and monetized by speculators to the detriment of society. Its not that Web 2.0 social network founders like Jack Dorsey could have built large scale networks without VCs and a proprietary for profit architecture, (— that was the only way to do it at the time) its that now we can do better! Nobody will want to do the hours of work im doing every day in the future to upload photos/videos to various networks laboriously one-by-one when theyre going to have the option to upload instantly to dozens ( perhaps 100s of different communities ). All the creators will move to platforms which will be easiest to get attention on and reach the most amount of people, and those platforms wont be on closed systems like Facebook or Twitter and their proprietary centralized databases. This paradgrim shift is already happening and you can check it out by signing up for BlueSky, ActivityPub or similar…