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Some examples of platforms being abandoned following user experience trends, MySpace to Facebook / Tumblr to Twitter / Snapchat to Instagram / Vine to Musical.ly etc.
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Downloading and reuploading someone else’s content has been around since the very beginning of social media platforms, so I won’t pretend like this is some modern issue. People will be reposting other people’s stuff online until the sun explodes
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Audience labor as a concept is tightly tied to the Marxian philosophy of audience commodity, where the user’s actions online contribute back to the economic value of either the platform, or any other related product. To engage in consumerism and to purchase a product, is to belong to it in reciprocal ownership
Heres some further academic articles that explain this whole thing more broadly than me
Mobilizing the audience commodity: Digital Labour in a wireless world - Ephemeral Journal (2024)
“...the expansion of waged and unwaged digital labour facilitated by these devices contributes to the overall mobilization of communicative, cognitive and co-operative capacities – capacities central to the accumulation strategies of ‘informational capitalism’. As such, the rapid uptake of IMD’s (internet-enabled mobile devices) globally is an integral component in this mobilization and subsumption. In the case of Smythe’s provocative (and somewhat controversial) concept of the audience commodity, the work of the audience is materially embedded in the capitalist application of communication technologies.” (Manzerolle, 2022)
The Politics of Social Media. Advances in Electronic Government, Digital Divide, and Regional Development (2020)
“...while media and communication technologies have historically fueled both aspiration and fear of social change, their ability to shape societies are contingent on the specific social relations in which they operate. By investigating social media's economic practices, primarily platform capitalism, the reproductive relations that support user-generated content that influence platform's capabilities to reproduce and transform existing social contexts are examined. To illustrate this, political discourse via social media platforms have been used to argue that social media's current capitalist mode of production exemplifies an antagonism between exploitative/emancipatory tendencies and reproductive/transformative aspects, which are further articulated by a liberal ideology…” (Flores, 2020)
If anyone understands any of what this means please let me know
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If you want a real world example of how something like this could potentially operate, take a look at the Stanley Quencher Cup’s popularity explosion across tiktok in the early 2020s . Stanley’s recent success is all thanks to the product-review mom-blog The Buy Guide, and the way they marketed it to other moms.
I.e. Selling your product to other members of your in-group, on behalf of a corporate entity completely out of touch with an audience they weren't reaching before)
Links
How a 40-ounce cup turned Stanley into a $750 million a year business
Good article that gives an alright timeline on it all
Just know that the moms behind The Buy Guide were making an enormous personal investment to stock on cups, and absolutely needed to sell them online.
And we’re still selling cups in September 2024
Viral stanley cup video of ice surviving a car fire
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I say “brand” here but band, author, producer, movement or otherwise are all applicable. It all depends on what the medium is, and what’s being promoted, this could certainly go beyond just music.
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maybe
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The word “emo” has been used to describe all kinds of media since the 80s, usually pertaining to music or culture found to be particularly emotional. This is obviously vague. While there is no concrete definition, (and I’d really rather not get into the history of emo music in this footnote (which would require another footnote)), there is only one thing that’s important to know right now. In the contemporary, digital age, when used in a text-based hashtag or caption, “emo” will tend to align your content with a very particular group of people through inscrutable algorithmic tuning. It is also a term many people tend to associate themselves with, giving it sticking power. Whatever meaning the concept of emo once had, either starting with the Beach Boys in the 60s, or with the movements of the 80’s and 90s, is now dead and buried, guarded by first wave emo gatekeepers, largely absent from the mainstream digital world. They find most popular social media to be repugnant and antithetical to the original emo movement. It's probably for the best for everyone involved.
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On the day I started emoenjoyer, I had made two separate accounts on both Meta and Bytedance’s media platforms, but found that Instagram Reels was a lot harder to find footing with, likely due to my inexperience with the service and some simple mistakes I must have been making. Tiktok has always been significantly easier for me to work with, and due to a higher traffic volume, my reach typically feels much broader. Being digitally based on Instagram, I also would have been able to crosspost on stories or collaborative posts to help promote my fledgling project, but at the time it was semi-important to me that I keep an air of anonymity.
WARNING: LONG UNRELATED FOOTNOTE ABOUT ALT ACCOUNTS
Some people on the internet (especially those with fragile egos or a severe lack of emotional intelligence) really fucking suck at keeping their supplemental identities a secret; particularly when spreading mind-numbling “political-commentary” memetic trash. Recently, at the time of writing (which will surely be outdated now), a user by the name of “Adrian Dittman” posted a screenshot on 4chan, writing a short blurb praising Elon Musk and claiming that he quote “gets lots of sex”. At the same time, Adrian accidentally revealed in his screencap to have admin and ban privileges on Twitter, evidenced by a completely separate UI distinct from the experience of the average user. It is worth noting that there was some dispute regarding the validity of this screenshot, but we really didn’t have to wait much longer for verification. Soon after, Elon Musk would pull back the curtain and admit to being Adrian Dittman, penning and posting a tweet of shame regarding “the liberal concept of self-love” that we all seemed to misunderstand (resources below). Fuck this guy and fuck the alt right.
Additional Links (the good part)
This article ended up being wrong, comments are great
Audio clips of “adrian dittman” in twitter spaces
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875758660154163254?lang=en
THE confessional tweet
This tweet makes me laugh every time
Since deleted
Elon Musk meets his sound-alike, Adrian Dittmann, in July 28, 2023 X Space
Longer clip of "adrian" and elon in the same call with twitter staff.
adrian-dittman-posted-a-screenshot-in-4chan-and-forgot-to-v0-0olabw63gpae1.webp
I could go further here and talk about elon using the word “fren” as an alt-right dogwhistle for anyone who is sympathetic/affiliated with the new maga / effective accelerationist movement, but this footnote is already too long and you should probably learn about that from somebody else. I will probably never write an article about e/acc because whatever I write will be out of date by the time I finish it. (I started this article in october24, and update! it is now feb 2025) they run the fucking federal government now.
Two more video resources on accelerationism and general technocapital.
Accelerationism, The Dark Enlightenment & The Strange Life of Nick Land
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Here’s some resources for downloading videos or audio straight from youtube and using for any other purpose you see fit.
Pay artists should be paid what they deserve, but I believe everything online should be free.
I used this for emoenjoyer, in order to help minimize editing time.
This was made by an individual from a reddit forum and I know nothing else about this service. Could be totally benign, probably is. idk.
Here’s what I use for downloading audio files for editing or djing
Its a downloadable program where you can paste youtube urls and download mp3’s straight from the app to your music folder. nice and convenient
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I run a few social media accounts built around community contributions (shout out plate watch), but emoenjoyer would not be one of those. For some time, my bio on tiktok read only “i am emoenjoyer, dm me submissions and post ideas”, to insinuate my content was (at least in part) a genuine, crowd-sourced collaboration. This was not true of course, and just to deliver a certain kinship to anyone viewing my profile for the first time. That’s not to say that I didn’t receive frequent dms and comments regarding my posts and requests for different, tragically obscure bands to be posted. No thanks, but hey thanks for the engagement and whatnot.
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Commenting on your own post is a two-bird-one-stone type operation for generating metrics, as well as for constructing a returning audience through applied sincerity. Comment engagement and curated uploads were my two strongest tools for advancing the agenda of emoenjoyer, (which at the time, was to just attract more followers and mutuals to engage with later).
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Post-Irony is to me, any form of media that makes a return to sincerity from a point of irony. Or otherwise being serious and meaningful, while feigning elements of ironic humor.
Ironic humor is easy to find among nearly all circles on the internet, but how often is sincerity? Or Truth? Ironic comedy is a defensive act against the struggles of living, and a deflection of the human experience into something easy to brush off, like lint on a coat.
Author James Foster Wallace is my inspiration on the subject of post-irony, and his work, an encouragement for the meandering prose of my articles, particularly this one. Consider his 1079 page novel Infinite Jest. I'm reading it right now, albeit slowly. If you don’t trust my endorsement, also know that it's on Luigi Mangione’s reading list, and surely you can trust him.
"The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of 'anti-rebels,' born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows." - David Foster Wallace, 1993 E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Wallace, David Foster, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
The essay from which this excerpt is from
Jreg: Post-Ironic Hyper-Political Extremism | Doomscroll
Two terminally online people give a good explanation of post-irony. You make up your own reasons for why it's cool to be sincere now, irony is dead, and we care about each other.
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Shout out to the greatest fictional character ever written into western media
“Woo! Check this out, I am on FIRE!!!”
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Short-form media typically has engagement buttons on the right side of the screen, within close range for the dominant hand thumb, enabling mindless liking and scrolling. Imagine if you had to reach across your screen to like or share posts, I imagine you’d probably do it less.
Sharks, that’s why I started my company Leftr, the cutting-edge social media platform of the future, built only for left-handed people. I’m looking for 2 million in exchange for 5% of my shares
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They say everything in life is sales. In this situation, I imagine that I’m just building rapport so that we can make that final close on another day. All I’m doing is buttering you up with some eclectic taste so I can run my hidden agenda on your subconscious at a later date.
The ultimate goal is that the next time you see my username at the bottom left of your screen, maybe you’ll pause and think twice before you scroll. That’s especially important when I start weaving my own self-promotion in there.
Set the hook, link to the spotify, wire me that 0.003 cents (we call those conversions in the business🧐) and bam. Now you’re making a living by freeloading off the fossil-fuel-powered consumption economy. Now you’ll never have to get a real job!
It's just that easy.
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Here’s another tip for posting: When trying to reach a specific audience for engagement, be sure to use subculture-specific hashtags to appear the most genuine (or otherwise masquerading as a member of the in-group)
A simple example here comes from trying to hashtag a band, don’t use their full name, use whatever acronym or shorthand that people of the community already use to interact with each other. So, instead of #carseatheadrest, you’d use #csh or #willtoledo. In the same vein, #modernbaseball becomes #mobo, or even #imissmobo. Incorporating vocab like this just takes a little bit of preliminary research on which aesthetic/audience/demographic you are looking to hit most effectively. Study the game.
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Don’t think that I’m bullying car seat headrest fans throughout this article too much here, I have a little bit more class than that to mock the people who support my content. Also, I wouldn’t be posting any videos that I didn’t legitimately think were good.
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That’s also why corporate brands use memes all the time to promote their products. People have a preconception about the types of individuals who tend to be making memes, particularly ones that don’t have an immediate advertising agenda.
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citations
citations
Flores, J. L. (2020). The Politics of Social Media. Advances in Electronic Government, Digital Divide, and Regional Development, 22–54. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-1791-8.ch002
Manzerolle, V. (2022, November). Mobilizing the audience commodity: Digital labour in a wireless world | Ephemeral Journal. Ephemerajournal.org. https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/mobilizing-audience-commodity-digital-labour-wireless-world
A series of dreams revealed to me (2024-2025)
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