Social Media and the Hobby

The Al Gore Rhythm.

At the start of 2022 I set myself the task of conquering the almighty Algorithm. My plan was a simple one. A post a day - every day - for 28 days. I had been led to believe by people far more knowledgeable than myself that the Algorithm prioritises your posts if you upload on a regular basis. So, I reasoned, if I post every day for a month the Algorithm will reward my loyalty? The aim was not to be too concerned with the engagement statistics and instead take a disciplined approach and give the Algorithm what it wants – frequent, new content. Quantity over quality, you could say. With sufficient tribute and sheer diligence, I believed, I could become a miniature painting social media baron. 

The grid image for my #ArtvsArtist2021 post.

I was intent on putting everything I'd learned from the previous year about social media through some rigorous testing. Whilst my little experiment wasn't necessarily intended to be a purely scientific one, with all that entails, a more disciplined approach to how I was using social media would at least lend me a better perspective on how it all works but would hopefully increase my visibility. But what did I ultimately learn makes a good social media post versus a bad one?

I have no idea.

An Omnishambolic Aquisition.

I do feel that social media has drifted very far from its original purpose. We all believed that we would be more connected – and would make more connections – than was ever possible before. In many ways that’s true. Take our hobby of miniature painting, for instance. It’s still a relatively niche art but through the internet – and in particular sites/apps like Instagram and Twitter – many of us have been able to find people like ourselves across the globe. There can be no doubt that it has been a boon for small, special interest groups.

But the landscape has changed quite dramatically in the past few years. It would be remiss of me not to mention Elon Musk’s recent omnishambolic acquisition of Twitter; the mass firings of vital staff, the reactivation of extreme and problematic voices on the platform, and the cosying up to extreme right trolls. You know, the usual stuff that happens when a billionaire narcissist who’s been told all his life he’s a genius by his toadies takes over one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. Dramatic as all of this has been (and very considerately timed since all my TV shows finished around the same time) it really has just been a particularly cartoonish manifestation of the overall sea change that has been taking place with social media for years now.

This image of my Moon Knight miniature was my best performing post this year by far at over 1,600 likes. More than double the 2nd highest.

As the power and influence of these platforms has grown, we have exponentially seen their capacity for malfeasance increase. Facebook sold private data to Cambridge Analytica, who in turn used information they aggregated to interfere in elections. Tiktok passes user information on to the Chinese government. Why am I talking about global scale espionage and corruption in an article that’s supposed to be about social media and miniature painting? I’m trying to find an off ramp, OK?

We all know how damaging social media can be and we seem to be comfortable with the belief that it’s a double-edged sword, as if all the code and interactions and proclamations are really just a force of nature; that it’s all just one big digital ocean, ebbing and flowing. Even though I’m writing about all the nefarious things that the social media giants use our information for I still maintain a presence on social media, so what has changed recently that’s made me re-evaluate where I stand with it all?

Personally speaking.

I think that if I’m being completely truthful it’s because a lot of the things that happened before just didn’t register with me. That’s not to say that the didn’t affect me – they absolutely did and in ways that I’ll probably never fully understand – but that on a personal level it can often be very difficult to see the bigger picture. Changes to my environment register much more easily, and my social media environment has changed dramatically over the past few years.

Instagram was – and still is to a certain extent – the best platform to engage with other miniature painters, companies and the hobby in general, largely due to the fact that it’s basically all pictures. With the explosion of Tiktok the platform has seen a dramatic change since Meta has decided that they want Instagram to basically be Tiktok. Indeed Adam Mosseri, Instagram boss man, stated in a video about the future of Instagram, published last June, that “we are no longer a photo sharing app or a square photo sharing app.” Superficially, that sounds great since “more than” is widely regarded as a positive thing. The reality is that “suggested content” is pervasive now, often supplanting the things users actually want to see in their feeds. It’s hard to keep up with painters who don’t have followings in the tens of thousands as they are increasingly supplanted in my feed by corporate promotions and 10-second videos of people lip-syncing to a piece of audio clipped from a film or TV show. The Infinite Scroll’s insatiable appetite for “content” is a hideous thing to behold.

This was my second most popular post on Instagram this year. Ghost Rider’s bike without him on it.

Naturally, all these tweaks, adjustments and alterations to what the app is and what it prioritises mean tweaks, adjustments and alterations to the vaunted Algorithm. Which in turn means that I need to make tweaks, adjustments and alterations to the way that I use the app if I want to stay relevant.

One such watershed moment came when Instagram initially began the transition to video app in earnest and wanted to ensure that posts that people could engage with for longer would be prioritised by the algorithm and appear more often in the feed. Obviously, we tend to linger on a video longer than a picture so this would logically mean that videos got a leg-up on pictures. Naturally, this is bad news for artists of all kinds who are trying to promote themselves and their work. One piece of advice that was given by many people more knowledgeable of the workings of how Instagram prioritises what appears in a user’s feed was to start doing gallery posts instead of single images so that people spent longer on your posts. It’s good advice, but it means even more time, and effort, and content invested into maintaining a social media presence for creators and individuals who are already struggling to do so.

I posted this Skurge mini on Instagram, forgot to include copy and hashtags, and decided to leave it up anyway. It actually performed better than 6 of the 7 previous posts that had hashtags and copy.

I think it’s important to highlight that a lot of the problems with social media stem from the sheer enormity of the volume of content that’s now there. When you have 2 billion users on a platform like Instagram, most of which are posting on a fairly regular basis, you’re talking about insane amounts of data. Even within the parameters of the algorithm that creates a hell of a lot of cracks for things to get lost in. Visibility on social media is much more of a lottery than we’d all like to think.

I’ve done what I can to keep up with the ever-evolving nature of social media but it hasn’t been easy. I don’t always understand why one post does extremely well and another fails to meet my expectations. I took a bit of an inadvertent hiatus from social media for about a month quite recently. Obviously, I felt better because it was a bunch of work that I didn’t need to do for a while, but it also made me realise just how much social media has distorted the value I place upon my own work. Sometimes I found myself finishing a miniature, being perfectly happy with what I’d done, and if I made a post about that figure that performed below average of the metrics I was observing it altered my perception of that work. It simply wasn’t as good because the Algorithm had spoken, and that’s a horrible way to interpret art.

Upon reflection.

For myself at least, the solution is going to be seeking out more meaningful interactions. I was looking through my best performing posts for 2022 on Instagram to put together the traditional end-of-year collage that has become so popular and it was difficult to discern an overall pattern in what makes a post popular. Some of the best pieces I painted this year didn’t even make the cut, and what apparently got the people of Instagram out of their seats often received a bit of a “meh” reaction from Reddit (and vice versa). In short, I saw that my suspicions that the element of chance is a much bigger factor in what makes a post successful reflected in my best performing posts.

#ArtvsArtist2022, featuring the pieces from this year I was proudest of.

If the numbers are random, they don’t really say anything. Even if they did reflect a collective opinion on my painting what good would it do me as an artist – as a person – to be guided by what everyone else thinks? In the end I decided to pick the eight pieces I painted this year that I was personally most proud of and to hell with whether they performed well or not. It’s very easy to be sucked into the comparison culture that social media has created; to be constantly checking how many likes a post is got and fretting if something doesn’t hit a certain threshold. Even after beginning this article I still have to remind myself that none of that stuff really matters. The Algorithm is insatiable, will always demand new content, and within days the piece that I laboured over will be forgotten. Don’t get me wrong – it’s exciting when a post blows up or someone I really admire acknowledges a piece I’ve worked on. But those dopamine hits and seconds-long interactions are all so ephemeral.

I’m making a conscious decision to be proud of my work and as present as possible going into 2023 and to that end I’m hoping to get along to more events and shows than I did last year. If you see me at all please be sure to say “hello!”