For as much as I've watched people write online for years, it also feels like I'm watching people's boats, too. At least for the four-ish years I've been officially sharing stuff online.
When you start paying attention to how content travels, you start to see people in different vessels doing different things at different speeds, and none of it makes obvious sense at first.
Josh Spector wrote something this week that I keep coming back to. He said:
Your content didn't have to be great enough for people to seek it out and share it with others. All you had to do was stuff enough keywords in it – or the equivalent gaming of the system – and platforms would send traffic your way. This is why most content on the internet now sucks. The death of search isn't a bad thing. It's good because we're a step closer to a world where the only content that gets traffic will be the content that actually deserves it.
Some people are incredibly good at reading it. You'll see them at an already elevated level, or watch them fly past you. You'll wonder how they've got the wind, or what wave they caught that you missed, and you're sitting there with your paddle feeling like a schmuck. And then the wind changes and you think that'll be your chance to catch up, but no. They go even faster and farther ahead.
This is the world of social media. The relative reality sharing content with the world subjects you to? It's weird and don't feel weird about how weird it feels. We all feel it. Some people just function better within those feelings.
What I've landed on - and finally feel like I can write down - is that the only durable thing in any of this is your process for navigating and noticing the currents. You get better at seeing it over time, and honestly, you get better at realizing how to adjust the relative measurements. Sometimes you will want to chase. But lots of other times, you see the current or wind or whatever change and you get more comfortable saying, "that's annoying, but ok. Sticking to my knitting."
This is the core of what I see Josh pointing at. The death of the gaming-the-system era isn't a loss for any of us making stuff in public. The river is actually a little bit more honest. Brutally honest, to be sure, but the optimizer metrics kind of just got flattened again in a sorta exciting way.
Your only job is to know what you're doing well enough to notice when you're in or out of alignment with it. Keep the process tight so you don't need the current to bail you out every time. You've got the muscles to keep grinding forward, because you know what direction forward is, and the relative measurements are options - to take cues or let others pass.
The algorithms change. That's what they do. Mind the river, but know your boat.
That's pretty much it.
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