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Build Your Own Platform
Delete and stop using social media; build your own platform instead!
1. Do you desire the maximum power?
First principle:
If you use the platforms of others (social media, publisher, news media, etc), then you can never develop to the fullest extent of your power.
You must own your own platform. Own your own web hosting (1and1.com or bluehost.com), and install open source tools such as wordpress.org. Avoid becoming a ‘digital sharecropper‘ (“leasing” the digital land from Facebook/Instagram), instead of building upon your own land.
2. No middle-men
Using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook messenger, What’s App (essentially any ‘free’ platform), you don’t have 100% control.
This is my theory:
By utilizing foreign platforms you can gain much in the short term. But if you desire to thrive insanely huge (become a $1 billion dollar company), you must build upon your own land (your own web services).
Furthermore the danger of building your following only on Instagram, Facebook, etc is this:
You no longer own the telephone wires to directly communicate with your audience.
You must own the platform, and be the platform.
3. Who do you desire to reach?
Who is your ‘ideal’ follower, viewer, or user? Do you need a billion users, or are you happy with a few, dedicated, and powerful individuals who follow you?
I would rather have 10 influential people follow me than to have 100 million “rando people” follow me.
4. Anti-Metrics
This is the problem with today’s insane “data-driven” society:
We treat data like god.
They also call this ‘data deification’– the idea that data (and numbers) is the ultimate truth. That more followers, more users, more money is better.
No. We are selective of what we create, and who we consider our equals (inter-pares).
5. Demetricate yourself
We must ‘demetricate’ ourselves, and learn to rely on our own creative gut, intuition and soul. We are far beyond trying to ‘optimize’ our “content” for a fickle algorithm. We must strive to please ourselves, and our other fellow human beings. I love humans more than I love algorithms.
Conclusion: For whom do you create?
Do you create for social media and algorithms, or do you create for yourself and your small yet loyal following?
“Until you own yourself you can’t be free. Until you own yourself you can’t be me.” – JAY Z
BUILD YOUR OWN!
ERIC
ARSBETA.COM — join the photographic revolution.
