05-11-2023, 02:39 PM
I don't feel that fooling around in chat rooms and having a few laughs is necessarily a waste of time. You can't really quantify the value of entertainment and relaxation. Not everything has to be motivated by profit.
The waste of time is in trying to convert a social media following into traffic to your own site. People on social media are, by and large, thoroughly addicted to social media, and seldom stray away from a handful of big corporate sites. They'd rather endure whatever abuse their corporate overlords dish out rather than fuck off to the real Internet.
Why should they? Every idiot and lunatic on earth is guaranteed a potential global audience of millions on one of the major platforms - at least until the pearl-clutching moderators ban them, terminate their account, or delete their content.
I had a somewhat sizeable following of around 2,000 on Gab. That's pretty good for a site aimed at a marginalized segment of the interwebz population. I plugged my site there for over a month before launch, and people seemed interested.
In reality, maybe ten people even bothered to take a look. Most of those were put off by a software bug or some other flimsy excuse, and never returned after their first visit. One guy consistently logged in and chatted everyday. One or two others checked in every so often.
So yeah. Social media may be fine for promoting a salable product. But converting social media users to Internet users? Forget about it.
The waste of time is in trying to convert a social media following into traffic to your own site. People on social media are, by and large, thoroughly addicted to social media, and seldom stray away from a handful of big corporate sites. They'd rather endure whatever abuse their corporate overlords dish out rather than fuck off to the real Internet.
Why should they? Every idiot and lunatic on earth is guaranteed a potential global audience of millions on one of the major platforms - at least until the pearl-clutching moderators ban them, terminate their account, or delete their content.
I had a somewhat sizeable following of around 2,000 on Gab. That's pretty good for a site aimed at a marginalized segment of the interwebz population. I plugged my site there for over a month before launch, and people seemed interested.
In reality, maybe ten people even bothered to take a look. Most of those were put off by a software bug or some other flimsy excuse, and never returned after their first visit. One guy consistently logged in and chatted everyday. One or two others checked in every so often.
So yeah. Social media may be fine for promoting a salable product. But converting social media users to Internet users? Forget about it.
