I chose the “emo” subculture just because it's where I felt most familiar making content within (fn7). When putting this practice into action on your own, feel encouraged to alter my method and curate your own profile to suit whatever community-subculture you prefer, they’re all different. On the subject of picking which social media platform to use, Instagram has always been comparatively more effective for me, engagement-wise, but TikTok was always where the new audiences and mass appeal was to be found. Leverage them both for maximum reach.

I'll also mention that I have limited exposure posting frequently onto other contemporary platforms, but I hypothesize that emoenjoyer would have really struggled on more text-based sites, such as Tumblr, Twitter, or Threads. A clever content-reposter knows how to best utilize the strengths and weaknesses of their chosen platform(s) to best engage with new and returning audiences (fn8). This is a skill you will soon become proficient in. 

It's also worth noting that while the initial vision for this project was rooted in simple concert recordings and meme edits, I wanted to fill in the gaps of my fabricated portfolio with found footage from around the web to flesh it out. Over quarantine, I had already made a youtube playlist filled with suitable emo-related content for ripping and reposting, so maybe I had this scheme subconsciously premeditated for longer than I originally thought (fn9). Most of what I ended up posting under the emoenjoyer42069 identity originated from this playlist, so feel free to peruse (fn10).

While there’s certainly something to keep in mind about the, shall we say, commercially-minded origins behind this fresh account, I still wanted to keep a general air of sincerity, if at least for my own conscience. I intended to keep things classy, and if possible, subtle. No twin-screening, flashing text or clickbait thumbnail elements representative of every other shallow short-form content-reposting shmuck. 

Ideally, emoenjoyer42069 should feel like a completely standard music content purveyor, reviving emo bangers in service of all the good people out there on the deserts of big data, looking for a lifeline into the real. I figured that my bread and butter for this project would be to make a good first impression with anyone checking my profile, get them to follow me for my great taste, and then hit them periodically with naturalistic self-promotion of my own brand, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. 

To help maximize engagement, and also to entertain myself, I made a habit of responding to the majority of the comments left on all my posts. This both doubled the total number of comments, as well as built rapport with surface-level emoenjoyers who may not be fully sold on following me just yet (fn11). When replying, I tried to respond in a mix of post-ironic prose and affirmation, spreading positivity and diy themes in an ascending order of importance (fn12). 

First, I wanted to uplift the scene as a whole, encouraging people to get off their phones, out of their homes, and into their neighbor’s backyard house shows. Second, I wanted to encourage a connection to music in general (which would not be hard considering the subculture I was operating within). And third, I wanted to promote anti-gatekeeping, supplemented by a mantra of inclusion for others regardless of identity, within a swiftly developing community surrounded by a theatre of otherwise disconnected short-form wanderers. 

Just to let you know, we are about to get into some real nitty-gritty media theory. There are plenty of other academic sources that break down this kind of thing better than me, (and some which tend to be much more verbose about it) but I’m going to leave this section of the article entirely uncited and source only from my own experience. 

Those other articles are kind of a hard read and I'd rather not emulate them.

You can think about Format as the literal layout of your screen when watching or engaging with a piece of digital content. This is the base of our pyramid. Fullscreen, windowed, swipe to scroll, UI overlay, option dropdowns etc. 

When posting anything, you should be asking yourself a series of questions related to each component in order. Some questions you might ask yourself relating to format may include: 

How much of the screen does my video take up? How much space do I have to fill with elements? How much negative space is left? How does my orientation help or harm the conveyance of my message (landscape, portrait, or square)? Where are the engagement buttons in relation to the subject of attention and is anything obscured?

On TikTok, (and like that of most other short-form content platforms), a standardized Format is necessary for getting the ideal, brain-fog doomscroll we all know so well. A uniform format creates a scrolling experience that is homogenized, consistent, and easy for viewing consumption, inducing a kind of dopamine-fueled stupor (fn15). All that really means is that you won’t be able to alter too much about the format structure of your content, they don't want to you to mix too much up. You’ll have to work around what you’ve got. Limitation sparks creativity. 

Format-wise, most short-form content posted within the music subculture today is either a series of readable images accompanied by sound, or a video with text overlaid. Both these approaches are suitable for reposting, and require only slightly different processes to use both. You can specialize in one, or try experimenting using multiple different kinds of formats. 

Posting curated videos with overlaid text is probably the easiest method to farm engagement and followers if you’re starting from a base of absolutely nothing, as long as you aren't being annoying with it. The key to benefiting from this kind of content is again, making it genuine enough to secure the follow. This is possible even with shameless self-promotion (the main motivator for a follow on this kind of content is oftentimes pity), but significantly easier with an alias, as we've been over. 

This is the big one. Can’t have good media with bad content. 

Or maybe you can🤔. 

Before you post, you should really ask yourself a series of questions pertaining to how your content will be digested and constructed in-app. Some questions of that nature might include: 

What is the hook of my post (aka why are people not immediately skipping)? Is there enough visual activity to be stimulating but not overwhelming? Who, or what, is the main subject of my video? Is my audio synced up? If not, and I overlaid my own custom audio, is it contributing thematically or algorithmically to my main content (i.e. using trending audio)? Is this content related in theme or caliber to the rest of my profile? Is the experience of consuming my content seamless?

Remember, not all elements of your content need to be on screen the whole time, we aren't trying to overwhelm anybody, and we want to keep our message clear and concise. 

Although I will say, within the contemporary short-form paradigm, using flashing, captioned text is probably one of the best ways to grab attention and provoke engagement. Don't consider anything like this a hard science though, media preferences and platforms change so rapidly that any playbook written on how to make efficient content becomes outdated quickly after release. Just look at how fast TikTok has changed and adapted, which has gone on to impact the variations of unique content trash currently finding success on the American Instagram Reels. 

When posting on emoenjoyer, I tried to keep overlaid text to a minimum, as part of that manufactured sincerity I brushed upon earlier. In relation to that, I typically included only a single sentence as a hook, flashed in the center of the screen, with smaller periphery text providing useful metadata and general context. Due to my sparse use of other elements, I ended up relying a lot upon my actual videos and images themselves being good enough to convince people to stay. This worked to an extent, as you'll see in Section 3.

Before posting, some questions you might want to ask yourself pertaining to context may be: 

How is my media post related to the broader American (or your country/region of choice) online conversation / digital cultural zeitgeist? What news is buzzing right now that may be relevant to my post, or would alter someone's else perception of my post? What other similar bands/sounds/brands/products/creators are popular right now that might have relation to my post? What other content might my post remind someone of, and is it leverageable? How likely is it that my audience has already seen this video or something similar? How niche, or already popular, is the interest of my video, might that give me an edge or a disadvantage?

Context is the hardest to get right in the moment, and impossible to predict over time. Some media could surely become timeless, but its hard to land, especially within the realm of content reposting. 

People post content on the web for countless reasons. To sell products, to become famous, to generate ad revenue through attention, to drive engagement somewhere else, to entertain or to express themselves, whatever.

To summarize the contents of the video itself, The setting is Spokane, WA in the year 2009. To a college-aged crowd inside a cramped, DIY music venue, Jerry Joiner is performing a solo math-rock set for the ages. This video will one day, become timeless, but nobody in the room knows it yet. Joiner spends the first minute and a half setting up 4 guitar loops on his pedalboard, before walking over and jamming out on the drums for the last minute or so, much to the delight of the crowd and my algorithmic/kismet digital audience. 

This is just a great video by pretty much every possible metric we could judge our content by for reposting. There’s high visual activity, with both the performer and the crowd in the background, so it's great for holding attention, but it takes a bit of time to really get going. To keep people from immediately scrolling by, I included some text at the beginning of the video, in the center of the screen to hold focus, “u gotta wait for the drums”. Looks like it worked.

There’s a lot of wind up until we get to our payoff, and in the meantime, I have to assume that people are passively scrolling through the comment section at the same moment they’re waiting for the drums to begin (at 1:40). 

I'm glad that this video was able to garner such a reaction, and to evoke such an atmosphere of sincerity. This positive reaction towards a given piece of content, (one that the average tiktok user might not usually get to see), is the epitome of the consumer to emoenjoyer pipeline I’m looking to establish. 

Entirely for personal gain of course don't get it twisted.

On a real and personal note, I rewatch this video frequently. My favorite time to watch Jerry Joiner shred is usually the first the moment I have at a house party with an unattended apple tv remote and empty living room. I’ve shown Girlfriends to all my friends, and this video means a lot to me. God bless Jerry Joiner and his phantom band. If I had a time machine this is where I would send it to.

Also worth briefly mentioning, this video has absolutely been posted to tiktok before, and maybe more than a few times before, so I'm definitely not some emo repost revolutionary. This particular post just happened to get picked up well by the algorithm. That, and I had a high volume of engagement and reposts, could be luck, could be proof of prior concept. You can decide for yourself, if you choose to put this all into practice on your own. 

Some extra things I want to mention but not get super into: 

• I intentionally used the words “Jerry Joiner” a million times in the caption and comment section in order to farm a blue search bar comment for the phrase “jerry joiner girlfriends”

  • It's good practice to make use of all the different extra mechanics these short form platforms tend to use now. I have a hunch that it’s more favored by the algorithm and boosts engagement. Remember kids, blue is goo(d). 

• Joiner drops a drumstick immediately after starting to play at around 1:44. He recovers, grabs another stick and keeps going. It also shows up pretty well on camera. Nice work Jerry. 

• Dancing guys could be their entirely own article with the ways in which people argue over them in the comments. Idk kids, is it cringe to dance like a loser at the local music show?? Want to know what I think? Who cares! Have fun, it's the end of the world and we’re all gonna die. I love dancing guy, and I did my best to defend his honor in the comment section. Shame he wasn't there to do it himself. 

  • There’s also someone who claims to be dancing guy’s current girlfriend, and you know what, even though she says he works at tiktok now, I'm still happy for them. Looks like scene kids get happy endings after all. Now you have to be like those instagram live millennial couples who try to turn their homeschooled preadolescent kids into a family rock band. 

Caption: cant find this one in many places anymore so thanks to the heroic csh archivists who saved such a legendary preformance from jimmy's clutches. you'll have to kill me jimmy fallon show if you want me to stop posting car seat headrest online. send your worst. #emo #diy #csh #carseatheadrest #midwestemo #music #live #livemusic #carseatheadrestmemes #alexg #fyp

I like this video. It means a little bit more to me knowing that this version of Bodys is nearly completely scrubbed from the internet on any other mainstream media platform out there (except for vimeo so shout out + linked above). If perceived value can be broken down into merely supply and demand, then I’m just doing my part by tipping the scales a bit. I actually originally found this video reposted onto someone else’s emoenjoyer equivalent account and tracked down the only permanent link that exists out there on the internet. Yoink. 

Quick tip, before you post, its always good to think about who your target audience is going to be. For this one, I’m looking to hit the twink-motivated, chronically-online “i hate car seat headrest” crowd with the content that they couldn’t get anywhere else upon the 'tok. They’d follow me, I’d post something of my own a few weeks alter, and then the investments would start compounding, as we’ve been over (fn17).

This one I actually made myself, but I stole the idea from a disco elysium meme I saw on my youtube recommended. I wasn’t overly subtle with it, and someone who had seen the original meme called me out for it. 

Who cares, meme stealing is hardly a crime.

I ended up editing this video on my phone in the TikTok app because I thought it would give me better reach. I mentioned this before but when I’m posting I like to use all available mechanics of whichever platform I’m using, (as tedious as it is sometimes) for better chances of hitting the algorithmic jackpot. This means editing within the app, using the basic text font, making a simple caption with good hashtags, all part of the execution. If you’d like to, consider using those “add yours” engagement buttons TikTok has been trying to popularize (I didn’t). The other major reason for editing this one on my phone was so that I could use TikTok’s version of grant wasserstein that was already uploaded as a sound. Same reasoning as above. 

If I was going to wrap this whole experience up, I’d say it went pretty alright. We built a modest following over a short period of time with relatively low effort. I mean, how else can we effectively judge something like this? 

By the numbers? 3.2k followers and 140k likes at the time of writing. A drop in the bucket.

One final thing, leveraging sincerity (or manufactured sincerity) on the internet doesn’t only come in the form of content reposting or industry-backed concert-goer impersonation.