Struggle of Content

Struggle of Content

Murat Yuksel

We are hypnotised with social media platforms for some time by now. But during this period we don't really realised how it is evolved moreover how we evolved by them. We don't share the things that we share 10 years ago. I will walk you through my thought process my social media experience/needs and at the end try to describe why I decided to add a blog section to my website.

Now there are far more intention to "share". we share because we know, want to be known, to learn, to interact, to impress, to manipulate, or we are just bored...

Before Web 2 it was only one or two of them. As we have far more to share, we also need more and more platforms. This is both for categorisations and also the medium of what we share. However, platforms are not really reflecting all these needs/reasons, at least not for me. Let's see what we have: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Medium, Flickr, 500px, WordPress, Tumblr, niche forums and platforms.

And also list what I need and match them:

  • Visibility: Hopefully my friends/family or potential "followers" should be there already
  • Topics: I should be able to share in different categories, like dad jokes, software development or photography...
  • Long Short Form: Different formats can be possible a 10000+ word blog post or a 100 character idea.
  • Photograph and Videos: I like photography so would like to share photographs, maybe voice recording or a video
  • Categorisation: I can share photographs both for photography art and for everyday life updates
  • Reliable: Should be reachable %99.++
  • Less Addictive

Twitter: Long form content still needs to be outside (hoping "Twitter Article" will be a thing), communities are not enough yet at least not solving the "follow this person but only technical tweets" part, photography related communities are weak. Video sharing is not for this platform. Still I prefer the "follow" logic compare to "add friend".

Facebook: If there were no "algorithm" and we could really decide what to see, this would be a close winner. All text, video and photography needs are solved here. Add friend logic is annoying don't want to see content from some of my friends. Communities are better here. Still "share in a topic" is an issue that can be solvable with groups etc. Losing visibility.

Instagram: For only photography still considerable but a photo app without albums is no go for me. Still trying to share one at a time for only photography category, not personal updates.

Medium: Paywall is annoying, also swarmed by lazy content writers, bringing quality down. Between clickbait titles still we can find quality content but don't see myself writing there regularly. For short form content not suitable.

YouTube/TikTok: not interested in video content much

Flickr/500px: good for photography intentions but nothing else

If Google+ became a success, that might also be the winner, they were trying "circles" to address topics.

Obviously I still need to be in multiple platforms, which doesn't solve the issue. But what about if I host all in my website and share the link? I can categorise as I want, for example I can share a dad joke without adding it to the navigation. Add photographs with albums/tags/categories, I can share personal photo albums in Facebook, others in Flicker or Twitter. Of course visibility is still solved by the social media platform I used to be in. But now I have a solution for some issues I had. I can write a blog post for a discussion on Twitter. Also don't lose track of what I share, on Twitter hard to find an answer that I wrote sometime ago. No platform dependency with next.js static html generation. Scalable with cloudflare pages, anything goes wrong I can switch to Github pages or Vercel without touching code.

Long story short I will start collecting my content here under my website. And maybe this will also encourage me to write and share more!

© 2022 Murat Yüksel