We've all heard that philosophical argument about how if a tree falls in the forest, but there's no one around to see it or hear it, did it actually fall? Well, that's kind of what being a creator is like. Because it doesn't matter how amazing your art is, how engaging your book might be, or how deep and thoughtful your video essays are, because if no one knows they exist, they can't actually become fans of your work. And since most creators don't have money to spend on advertisements, or doing dozens upon dozens of conventions where they take a loss every time as they try to build an audience, we rely on social media to get the word out about what we do.
And while social media enshittification has been hitting hard, I've been managing to tread water... until recently. Because the last piece of driftwood I was clinging to seems to have snapped underneath me, and now I'm back to trying not to drown.
And this, of course, involves the hive of scum and villainy that goes by the name Reddit.
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| A hand up would be deeply appreciated right now... |
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The Social Media Saga (And Why This Is Such A Problem)
The official term for what we're all struggling with these days is Platform Decay, but most of us refer to it as Enshittification. Essentially social media started off as a free, functional way for us to keep in touch with our friends, family, and creators, celebrities, etc. that we liked to follow, and it mostly worked. But over the past several years it's been deliberately sabotaged, twisted, and made impossible to use as a creator (and nearly impossible to use for regular people, too). I talked about this more in-depth in The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone These Days (Not Just Creators) a while back, for those who missed it.
For those who like numbers, I have a couple of Before and After averages to share, from about 10 years ago, and today. Keep in mind that my subscriber count has only gone up between these two time periods, so if anything I should have held steady, instead of decreasing to a fraction of engagement.
- Average Facebook spread used to net between 400 and 1,000 impressions. Now it's barely 25.
- Average Twitter blast used to net between 100 and 250 impressions. Now it's less than 20.
- StumbleUpon netted me between 50 and 500 impressions. The site is unusable anymore.
- Digg would net between 25 and 1,000 impressions. AI slop broke the site entirely, and it's closed.
For sites that aren't listed, Tumblr and LinkedIn both have significantly lowered engagement. Pinterest is a ghost town that's jam-packed with AI slop. Google+ is gone, of course, and sites like MeWe have never been worth more than a few dozen views. Blue Sky has never been great for creators (though it's quite a nice platform for journalists and news creators), and places like Discord and Mastadon have no discoverability because all the servers are separate, with no way to cross-pollinate.
And in the midst of all of that, Reddit was a website that has been chugging along. You could even keep using the old version of the site, which made it easy to see and understand at a glance what was happening. My current Reddit account has over a quarter million karma (not bragging, just pointing out the amount of positive interaction I've had on the site), and it's been active for 11 years.
Then I was shadowbanned last week. No warning, no explanation, just POOF, your account is gone. I appealed, and got it back, but the issue I was facing was that even though the decision was made by a random bot (and was immediately overturned by a human), being shadowbanned immediately hid all of my submissions to the website.
So while my karma count was still intact, over a decade of posts were just swept under the rug, and unable to be seen by users. And while I don't usually use language quite this strong around here, this incident has fucked me as a creator... and to make it worse, at time of writing, I was randomly shadowbanned again, likely because a bot just decided that I'd crossed an unspoken line and had to be removed, even though nothing about my behavior has changed in a decade on the site, and it's never been a problem before today.
Why This Is Such A Big Damn Problem
The reason this is a massive problem for me is two fold. The first is fairly obvious; if I'm shadowbanned on Reddit (or if I keep getting shadowbanned by AI-driven bots) then I cannot share links to either my work, or anyone else's work. I try to maintain the balance and not just talk about my stuff all the time, and I mix it up with videos, RPGs, etc. by other creators that I enjoy, and think more people should hear about.
However, I want to circle back around to how it has hidden a decade of my submissions, essentially making them unusable. Put another way, that's somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 posts just poofed out of existence like a Thanos snap. That's also a low-balled guess as to just how many posts I've made over the past 11 years.
If you want to know what that's worth, most days when I check my DTRPG earnings, I had between $10 and $25. That's not an amazing income, but it adds up at the end of the month, and it paid most of my half of my rent. Ever since I was shadowbanned, and all those posts were removed? I'm making somewhere between $3 and $8 a day. This past weekend I had the first day in 4 years where I didn't sell a single thing on DTRPG at all, and it's directly correlated with this decision.
This shadowbanning didn't remove any of the blog entries I'd written, of course. It didn't delete articles or videos. It just made all those things less visible, effectively slamming the door on people randomly stumbling across my work while running searches or browsing the site. And again, if people don't see this blog, my videos, my supplements, etc., then they can't interact with them, which means I can't pay my bills.
EDIT: Apparently it's just regular banned, as my account was basically shuttered up. There's no "shadow" about the whole process.
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| And since no other sites are working either... you see where this is going... |
The bigger kick in the nuts here is that while Reddit can absolutely erase over a decade of submissions to the site on the word of a bot, it can't restore them. You basically have to ask the subreddit mods to pretty please go through the removed posts and reapprove them, or resubmit those posts. Mods are not willing to do this, and certainly not to the extent that would be required for some of the subs I regularly post in where there are hundreds (potentially thousands) of posts going back for years (since some I posted in weekly, and others I posted in daily). And while there's nothing stopping me from resubmitting my posts (except the site's bots deciding that me submitting things is suspicious), I built up that 11 year archive organically. I didn't just show up all day, every day blasting my own signal for hours at a time. I shared my own stuff, yes. And then I shared actual plays that I'd seen. Or I commented on a topic. Or I told everybody about this other game, supplement, etc. that I'd seen. Or I shared bundles, such as the Owen Stephens Summer Survival Spectacular to help Owen Stephens pay the bills for his fight against cancer. You get the idea.
You can't just replace all those posts in a few months, or even a year. It took me 11 years to submit them in the first place, it would take me a decade to get back to that point. And even after that decade of posting, assuming everything went perfectly and I wasn't randomly shadowbanned, I still wouldn't have my archive restored. Because you see there were a lot of subreddits that I was no longer allowed to post in, but they still had all my previous posts acting as one more place someone might stumble across me... those are gone, and cannot be replaced.
So... yeah. I was already trying to crawl out of the muck, and now because an overzealous collection of 1s and 0s decided I wasn't up to their secret standards, I've now been kicked in the teeth, and thrown back down into some fairly desperate circumstances as a result.
What I'm Going To Do (And How You Can Help)
Wallowing isn't going to help me, especially since I need to get back on my feet before yet more bills come due. Unfortunately, there's only a few things I can do. First and foremost, I'm trying to appeal the shadowbans, to get some statements from the site about what's happening, and to stop this cycle from happening again. I'm also looking for alternative sites, Discord servers, and communities where I can make up at least some of the lost audience potential. And, lastly, I'm going to keep making stuff for people to enjoy, and hope that I can overwhelm the algorithms with the sheer volume of projects I'm churning out.
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| I don't really have any other options. |
However, I'm basically at the mercy of you all. I'm in the Colosseum fighting for my life, and I need the crowd to roar in my favor so that I can be allowed to live and fight another day. So if you made it this far, I have a list of things you can do to help me for free, and a list of things you can do to help that will cost a bit of money... not much, though. As art goblins go, I'm a fairly cheap pet.
So, without further ado...
How You Can Help For Free
- Subscribe To The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)
- Subscribe To The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)
- Read my articles on Vocal.Media (every read puts a penny in my pocket)
- Share my articles, videos, RPG supplements, and anything else I make on your own social media pages (and if you're a Reddit user, tell your favorite subs about stuff I make out of spite)!
How You Can Help If You Have A Budget
- Buy Some of My TTRPG Supplements (link goes to a pin board, but you could also search "Neal Litherland" on DTRPG to get the full 200+ list of things I've made)
- Buy Yourself A Tub of Dubby (use the code LITERARYMERCENARY for 10% off this powdered energy drink)
The reason I put all of this out there is that I literally do not care how my bills get paid. If 50,000 people decide to buy copies of my hardboiled cat novels Marked Territory and Painted Cats, then I'm going to pause a lot of projects to write a third installment in that series. If a bunch of people decide to support me on Patreon, then I'm going to make sure my blogs are polished up, and that everyone is getting their money's worth. If a couple thousand people decide they want to get my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic, then I'd focus on expanding that game, or if folks picked up supplements like The Blade Itself: Corrupt Equipment For Hunter: The Vigil, Like A Good Neighbor - Portraying True Fae in Your Chronicle, or Night Horrors: Primordial Peerage, I'd put a lot more time and energy into extra content for Hunter, Changeling, Beast, or other spheres of the Chronicles of Darkness.
And, of course, if folks want to see more of The A.L.I.C.E. Files, I'd be making bigger, longer, and more complicated soundscapes to tell some of my rather... involved stories.
This whole situation has put me in something of a bind, but I'm not just sitting here twiddling my thumbs hoping things get solved. If you can help, please do so, because I need every hand up I can get. Even if you just follow my Patreon as a free supporter to stay up-to-date, or you just subscribe to the YouTube channels, or share my supplements online when you see them, it makes a difference. And if a few hundred individuals who think their efforts won't matter all pitch in, then you're going to be a damn potent force.
As always, stay tuned for more updates, and thank you in advance to everyone who helps me stop this slide toward the cliff's edge before I go over.
Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!
That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!
Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the Azukail Games YouTube channel, or my additional audio dramas over on The A.L.I.C.E. Files! Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my dystopian sci-fi thriller Old Soldiers, my hardboiled gangland noir series starring a bruiser of a Maine Coon with Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!
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