Survival of the Fittest Social Network

My how the internet has changed since the turn of the century and I’d like to share some of my recent experiences with you.

I watched a guy recruit workers for a no-content or low-content KDP publishing business on Amazon. He was earning 25k per month by uploading random words that were consumed by the bots infecting the subscription platform. He was a parasite on the back of a parasite that feeds off of the hard work of real authors.

I watched the guy who plagiarized my book gain 90,000 Twitter followers over the course of a week for no discernible reason. He gets only a few likes on the things he posts, so they are clearly fake. In comparison, a truly famous author like Anne Rice who posts regularly has 180,000 followers.

I watched a video about a guy who spent 250 Euro to get 25,000 Instagram (fake) followers. He was then offered 3000 Euros by a collection of marketing firms to promote their products.

I visited a chatroom with 250 members and came to the conclusion that 90% of the posts came from an advertiser with 15 sockpuppets. It was a mom’s discussion group associated with the college I went to and many of the members did not seem aware that their ‘friends’ were advertising audio books and baby thermometers.

I read about how Amazon sellers use Facebook chatbots to cheat their way to good reviews. You too can have a free cell phone charger if you leave a five star review for these products!

I read this post today on Twitter:
@CaseyNewton Mark Zuckerberg posted a link to my story to 117 million people yesterday and got 58,000 reactions, an engagement rate of 0.05 percent. A Facebook follower truly ain’t what it used to be.

My kids used TicTok and now a Chinese company knows everything about my children. When I protested that they were underage and I wanted their profiles deleted, TikToc requested more identifying information from me in order to complete the request.

My husband plays a video game called Clash of Clans and has had lots of conversations with his friends on the platform. The game was recently sold to a Chinese company that now knows more about my husband than I do.

I just started my WordPress blog and find that it doesn’t facilitate fast networking compared to my profile on quora – as in, my posts don’t get distributed as widely and I have to do the work of reaching out to other bloggers to get links forwarded. Maybe that is its strength as well as its weakness. It relies on human interaction rather than on an algorithm to determine distribution.

Some people may think I am foolish for putting my face and voice on the internet since I practically open a door for bad people to find out everything about me. I understand that, but I have had some life experiences that gave me a more devil-may-care, memento mori attitude about my life. YOLO! I wrote some books with stories that I think will help people and I want people to read those stories. I am creating videos and blog posts so that if anything happened to me, my kids would still be able to figure out who their mom was. Still, for everybody else, how long will it be before social networks start charging people to have their profiles deleted? How long will it be before YouTube decides to hit the self-destruct button because so many people are talking to their cameras rather than to each other?

I’d like to conclude this post by singing some songs about our love affair with social networks. If you scroll to the end of the reading of this post, you’ll hear Mad About You by Hooverphonic and a song by The Sundays’.

Talking to a camera for fun would typically be considered a sign of madness if not done to serve a higher purpose.

I am trying to get people to take a look at the books I wrote and I view these videos as practice for more real-world public speaking.. so maybe I’m not mad.. maybe. Madness is a cultural construct and the internet has driven all of us off the deep end!