It’s been a while now since I got rid of all my social network accounts. A few years ago I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. In it, he discusses how constantly checking these platforms can distract you from focusing on your work, on your daily life. He gives a few ‘dipping your toes into the water’ things to try, like stopping yourself from pressing like on posts or removing the apps from your phone so that when (or if) you do decide to go onto a platform for a specific reason—like needing to check the local school’s Facebook group or page for information—you do it on a computer. You get in, deal with whatever it is you need to deal with, and get out without getting trapped by the algorithm.

I struggled with this for a while. Initially, I simply set all my accounts to private and deleted the apps from my phone. But I would constantly redownload them and poke my head back into the digital world I’d spent years cultivating for myself. I missed the feeling of getting likes and comments on the yo-yo tricks I wanted to share. When all the platforms started shifting their focus from their initial formats to short form videos, however, I began noticing something about myself I didn’t like. I started posting several times a day in an effort to maximize the potential that one of those posts might go viral. I would stand around for a few hours recording tricks until I landed a few that I felt fit the potential to spread, and then I’d edit them down to the clean version of the tricks and post them all over the rest of the day.

I noticed after a few months of doing this that I wasn’t happy. I was spending a lot of time working on these fleeting creations that, while in the moment I was pleased with, going back and looking at them later showed that I wasn’t proud of what I’d spewed out onto the internet. When I started posting tricks online (on YouTube) years ago, it tended to be tricks I’d spent months creating, polishing, and getting just right. I’d record those tricks, edit a full video of them creatively and try to time them to some music I was enjoying at the time, and publish those to my YouTube channel. Then I’d go on to yo-yo forums, subreddits, and even my social media accounts and share these polished pieces of work. They would be viewed by yo-yoers, and if the content was good enough, they’d get a few hundred or sometimes maybe a thousand views. These were my peers—people who understood what they were seeing and the work that went into making it.

This subtle difference, I think, is the why behind my dissatisfaction with the short videos. When I was cranking out short videos and hoping they might go viral, they weren’t being viewed by my peers. They were being spread to a general audience who may or probably wouldn’t give a damn about what they were seeing me do. Trying to get a big number of views from a general audience encouraged me not to focus on honing my craft, but instead spend hours every day trying to land something I thought would look cool to the uninitiated. If I landed something flashy that looked hard to a non-yo-yoer, the video might get several thousand views and I would get this dopamine hit from it. There would be hundreds of comments saying “this is cool,” and many more saying “you obviously have a lot of time on your hands.” And then the next day I could post a video that, in my opinion, was just as good if not better than the one which did well yesterday, and to my disappointment it would get an order of magnitude fewer views.

It was as if every day I was starting with a clean slate. Even if yesterday’s video went semi-viral and I got subscribers/followers and lots of comments, the way this new short form system worked meant that when I posted next, those new people who raised their hands and said “I want to see more of this!” weren’t being alerted to the fact that I had posted anything else. The way the algorithm seemed to work was: when you posted content, it would test the waters, show it to a group of new people who happened to be scrolling the feed at that time. If they watched the video, liked it, or commented on it, then the video would be promoted to another group of people to confirm it was suited for a general audience. This tended to repeat until the video plateaued and died.

My old long form videos, on the other hand, had a different audience behavior. When I posted a long video meant for my peers—and my audience—the views would come in over time. As they were alerted to the fact that I had something new up, they would come and check it out. If I did a good job in the video, they tended to stick around until the end and give me some insightful comment about it. You’d see the same screen names and avatars and build a relationship with your fellow travelers. It had a definite community feel to it. Those videos even would be searched for—the traffic would continue weeks, months, and years later. If the video was educational or entertaining, the audience would spread it to their friends. If someone was learning how to yo-yo, an existing audience member would promote my tutorials to them. If I did or said something goofy in a video, then I’d hear about it in the various chatrooms the yo-yoers congregated in. I’d even get private messages from time to time telling me they’d learned a trick I made or were trying some technique they saw in one of my videos.

When I read Cal’s book, it was right around the time I was feeling largely disconnected from this audience I’d spent a decade and a half cultivating. Whether I had posted a long form video for them, or a short form video for the masses, there was this invisible barrier coming up between us. The long form content wasn’t being distributed the way it had once been. The short form content didn’t always spread, and even if it did, the feedback I got wasn’t from my peer group—they didn’t understand what they were seeing. And to get seen by them, I had to dumb myself down to the general audience level. I felt betrayed by the platforms I had spent so much time and effort on, and Digital Minimalism seemed to explain what was happening.

It led me to ultimately calling it quits. The rug had been pulled out from under me, and I no longer wanted to be the dancing monkey the platforms wanted me to be. I downloaded all of my content to my laptop and started deleting accounts. It was difficult at first. I still had an addiction to attention I needed to overcome. After a few months without Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube, that feeling of wanting to be seen and appreciated for something I had worked on was still there. So I’d make a new Instagram and post tricks. But because there was no established network this time, it was a hollow feeling that came from it. If I wanted to be seen, I had to go right back to posting content that wasn’t pushing my skill level in my craft, and I would be reminded of the fact I was only doing this for attention. I’d hang my head, delete the account, and get back to focusing on my life.

Having this space has resulted in a few changes in me. I have noticed how trying to conform to these platforms’ distribution strategies was making me feel not only meaningless but also slightly ashamed for having craved the attention of others so much that I kept relapsing and returning for more. I began trying to take this want for attention and turn it into productive work. For a year now, I’ve been passively working on creating a book or video (it’d work better as a video, but I want to write this stuff out and then make the video) called Introduction to Yo-Yoing. I realized that one of the things I really enjoyed before the distribution betrayal occurred was hearing from people who’d learned from my content and how it helped them progress. I wanted some of that back. And I figure it was a noble enough way to get a dopamine hit that I occasionally sit down and write a few paragraphs when the motivation comes.

I’m still figuring out this area of my life, of course. And I’ll find myself wanting to make an account on Instagram or Facebook from time to time—still wanting attention for some trick I’ve been working on recently from people who understand it. But I am better at reminding myself that I’m not wanting to do that for anything but a selfish reason. Those tricks might be entertaining to someone for a moment and may get me a few likes and comments, but they aren’t going to make a long-term impact like a piece of educational content might. I remind myself of the 10-hour days I was putting in in the past, and how those took my immediate attention away from my family, from other work I wanted to do, from knowledge I wanted to acquire or experiment with—and the hollow feeling that came shortly after the attention was received. How it led to me burning out, becoming disenchanted, and, as I said above, betrayed by the platforms for having changed the rules mid-game.

Writing these essays is an effort for me to not only explore things I’m interested in and learning about, but also to work through what I’m thinking and feeling. For some reason, it’s hard to really understand my feelings about what I’ve been doing unless I write it out and review it a few times. I don’t tend to make myself do that, however, and my hope is that in making myself write this to be published—use that leverage I know I have on myself for a want for attention—that I’ll begin to build this muscle of self-reflection I know I could use. I’m not sure if this will be of any value to anyone, but I hope something in here was useful. Perhaps someone else out there has felt how I have felt about playing to the algorithm, and this could give them some insight on what they’re feeling and why.