Social media was initially made to make human connection easier. Rather than telling everyone in person what you did, you can just upload a quick photo and show everyone at once! But for whatever reason, it’s not really used this way anymore. Few people younger than the millennials post anything genuinely candid anymore. Most things posted are calculated, and even if they seem quick and simple, a lot of the youth spends 10-30 minutes fixing up their story or latest post to make it seem as natural as possible.
It all feels so weird now. Give a lot of effort, and it’s overdone and doesn’t “do well,” meaning there won’t be many impressions. But if it’s not “clean” enough, it won’t do well either. So now, most content is so deliberate that it’s just too much work at this point. The past few years have seen multiple startups trying to fix the problem, but nothing really sticks. I like the ideas of these new apps launching, but it’s going to be hard to make work, because people live a second life online now. “Natural” is almost impossible; users would either need to ditch their second lives or add a new one to their routine.
For these reasons, I deleted my photography account a few years ago. I was growing my community and getting tons of likes, just as I had always wanted. But then I noticed I would go out and take photos just to post them, and I questioned what the point of any of that was. Two of the last photos I posted were my favorites I had ever taken, and I was so excited to post them. They flopped! I felt confused, and started thinking deeper about why I even cared at all. Isn’t this just for me? Why do these online impressions matter if it’s not even my job?
Luckily around the same time, I started getting more into the web and thought it would be fun to have my own photo portfolio. I never really got around to it, because I initially just put raw photos into an HTML document and realized it was taking five minutes to load the page. I notice this performance problem with lots of photographers and artists hosting their content. The non-technical solutions are getting better, but still have a long way to go.
My photos page is mostly done now. I still keep finding things to improve, and today made some good progress on it to keep the load times down. I am continuing to work on this and hope to open-source it along with an easy to follow guide to help folks host and maintain ownership of their photography or art. I want to finish a system that allows us to remove files from our cameras or phones without compression, but serves them compressed to end-users. So far, I like the idea of what I’ve set up now, which is like a small camera roll of photos I wouldn’t have shared as standalone posts.
Lots of people have a “spam” account where they dump all their photos and then delete them from their phone to save storage. But after doing that, you lose the original files forever and might lose the compressed ones too if anything happens to the account. My personal setup is almost fully automated now, and allows me to post photos to my page with little effort. I AirDrop photos from my phone to my computer, put them into a folder on my desktop and build my site. Building compresses the image, creates a thumbnail, and places it into the image grid.
The fun part will be adding an extra backup step that offloads all of these images into various simple storages uncompressed, and a separate optimized one to serve to users just like social media. Then, just like with the spam account, you can clear out the phone storage but know that the files are still there. With a nice interface connected like file.rocks, downloading and managing the files can be nice and simple. With more people growing frustrated with things like dwindling impression counts and the subscription and ad economies, maybe we’ll see more of this type of media sharing again?
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