This place is good because it doesn’t try to be all things to all people.
If you like Elektron products, you will probably have a good time here. If you irrationally hate a Swedish interpretation of a Japanese drum machine that makes people get up and shake their butt around the world, then you probably won’t bother to create an account here.
This is also why if you find yourself in a random city and go to the big club with the velvet ropes and the long lines, you probably won’t have a great time. Find the smaller club with irregular beats and dive-bar drinks & prices.
Deleted all social media crap like 3years ago. You never miss it. It’s utter dogshit.
It was ace back in 2007-2008 when at uni and it was just you and your mates having banter about the party last night or arranging the next party etc (tbh most things we’re better back then……) .
Also, every band/producer Ive really liked I’ve never found via a social media site but rather talking to my mates or listening to stuff at a venue or friends house etc or just going down the bandcamp/soundcloud rabbit holes.
Using Instagram solely to promote music (or anything really) is a massive black hole, not to say it’s not possible it’s just a clusterfuck. I worked doing social media for a few different companies at one point which is ironic because I deeply disdain what the entire concept of social media has become and it’s effect on society.
I don’t work in the field anymore but I do have a personal Instagram, I don’t use it to promote my music just to share stuff with friends both in real life and online. The biggest thing is that I don’t follow anyone that I don’t personally know or have an interest in, I have more followers than people I follow. Other than family and irl/internet friends I only follow artists that interest me primarily by searching hashtags of gear and stuff that I use and/like (like #analogrytm#machinedrum#UKgarage#eurorack#buchla etc) so checking my Instagram is never ever stressful, I’ve heard a lot of people follow what they aspire or “influencers” whose lives they wished they lived…I can’t think of anything more toxic to do with your time and no wonder people are so fucked.
I like to follow artists that use the same gear as me and see what they post that gives me inspiration to push what I do in other directions.
I read an article that said most people spend an average of around 6 hours a DAY on social media and I immediately thought what kind of fucking loser spends that much time on social media, I checked my screen time on my phone and I average a little under 6 hours a week on social media. I don’t have Facebook because it’s an absolute dumpster fire with literally nothing of value to add for anyone. I’m alright with Instagram though I deeply hate the parent company (seriously I sincerely hope Zuckerberg and his whole vision of his ‘Metaverse’ fail spectacularly)
But I think it highly depends on how you use it and what you use it for, being aware of what your exposing yourself to and not taking any of it seriously. I miss the days when the internet was make believe, now since there’s so much money being invested and all of the old people that run things are aware of the internet it’s become a bizarre form of reality for a lot of people (children in particular I’m concerned about) especially now since so many people take information on social media seriously enough to make decisions about their health and who they vote for etc from it.
Social media will only exist as long as humans occupy it, we are the product, and if enough of us simply stepped away or at least spent significantly less time on it then it would lose its power.
If you have children (like I do) I would suggest when they become the age where they’ll feel the need to participate that we all talk with them about the reality of social media and it’s impacts, the intentions of these companies and strategies the companies use and how harmful it can be, my daughter is only 5 so I have some time before that conversation happens and I’m not sure how much of an impact it will have on her but I plan on making that conversation just as important as the inevitable birds and the bees conversation we’ll have one day. I read a story of a girl who was maybe 11 or 12 who killed herself because she thought all of her friends hated her because of how long they took to open her snapchats…that’s so fucked and so scary. As parents we have to stay super educated, it’s like keeping you kids off drugs.
I don’t know as you can see I have mixed feeling about the whole thing, I hate it but I use it. That being said I don’t use it much and I don’t feel any negative effects from the amount I use it, I don’t care about how many views or likes a musical idea I post gets, But if I relied on likes to validate my talent I would be a wreck so as an artist we shouldn’t expose ourselves to any social media bullshit that would influence us in any way. Never ever taking it series is key. As far as exposure I don’t think Instagram is going to bring us anything of value, you could had a million followers but it’s passive, people see it maybe they like it and they move on. Maybe some of those people will click your link and buy your music but from my experience working in the field it’s like a 1/1000 ratio, people will follow and like but not buy. It’s more important I think to find your audience and get in front of them the way you’d want an artist to get their music to you, through a label, through a radio station something like that. I literally can’t think of any artist that I’ve “discovered” on Instagram that I’ve went on to support, I can name dozens of artists I’ve found though labels I respect and from hearing their tunes on stations I listen to (I’m speaking of internet radio of course, like sub.fm, rinse.fm, playbackUK, psychoradio etc etc etc).
YouTube is an entirely different beast, I have discovered a few artist via YouTube by accident I don’t look for it there. SoundCloud and Bandcamp would be where I’d be looking and to a lesser extent maybe Spotify.
I don’t know but what I do know is social media fame and social media sales are both incredibly flimsy and hollow. It’s not a bad way to reach out to fans and show them a little behind the scenes or sneak peaks but it’s a horrible way in my opinion to acquire an actual meaningful audience that’s going to support you.
I’ve taken a few month break after deleting my accts.
I have a goal while on those platforms now, like when i go to the store.
I used to go there looking at random shit, now i have a purpose.
If you don’t have a specific, legitimate purpose to be onna social media, and you can’t help yourself, i advise taking a break, until it no longer matters.
all of my interactions are now about music in some form, buy/sell/promote and that’s pretty much it. It was also an opportunity to shed toxic friends, who don’t add anything positive to your existence.
I know my friends who matter now, and i know that my few chosen family are the ONLY people whose opinion ACTUALLY matters in my life, and how to aviod getting triggered by people on the internet who have opposite values that you, that’s still difficult for me, i block a lot of people now, lol…
This for me helped my engagement with IG immensely: it is not optimized for the browser, in fact it punishes you in a sense (chat is almost unusable). I get in with what I want to do and out, avoiding getting sucked in.
Yeah, a buddy of mine recommended that as an alternative to getting rid of my account. I’m pretty sure I would never look at it if it was only on the computer.
I wonder how things will be in few years time with the metaverse and all that jazz right around the corner. The way smartphones and social media have changed human interactions and life so fast and completely it’s easy to imagine we haven’t seen anything yet.
VR hardware isn’t ready for the masses yet. It’s bulky and expensive and makes most people nauseous after 45 minutes of use or so. And you need a dedicated room for your VR setup. I’d bet that most people who have spare rooms and might be VR customers have already turned it into a home office.
In my mind, Metaverse is a distraction and tacit admission that Mark is out of ideas and grasping at straws.
I don’t think VR hardware and software has reached the Atari 2600 level (usable by hardcore nerds) much less 8-bit NES (bulletproof, fun for everyone) needed for mass market adoption.
That is good to hear. I haven’t been paying much attention to the hardware side of things and was thinking that maybe bcs of gaming people would have the needed gear already.
FB makes most people nauseous even faster and they still use it around the clock though.
I see the Metaverse more like a video game rather than something that is actually useful. Younger folk (I’m getting too old for this shit and don’t really care) might ‘play’ the Metaverse for distraction purposes and I’m sure a lot of funny shit will come from it just like current social media. But all that crap they showed like virtual concerts, work meetings in virtual offices, and so on, will quickly die away, imo. It’s early days, of course, but I see this going the way as watching 3D movies at home and the massive privacy violation that is Google Glass – I.e., it won’t ever become mainstream and will probably be a relatively small niche interest or it will ultimately be abandoned due lack of take up.
Google Earth with a decent GPU on a 50" 4K display is an amazing experience. Before the plague, we were thinking of relocating internationally. The plague cut travel short, so we’ve been using Earth to check places out. It is particularly nice for evaluating condo towers - you can put the camera at exactly the right level to see what the view looks like. No VR headset needed.
On the VR side, I’ve had a handful of headsets. We have the Playstation VR that shipped with PS3/PS4 now. It is adequate for rhythmic exercise games, but I do all of my gaming on big LCD screens instead of headsets.
The killer problem for me is that when I put on a VR headset, the screen is millimetres from my eyeballs. I need to close-focus on the image, but all of the spatial information (parallax, etc.) is telling my brain that the objects it sees are meters in front of me. So part of my brain wants to close-focus, and part wants to distant focus and the result is a headache.
More on Cybersickness - a problem that was known about long before FB ever existed that FB has no solution for.
Even if Cybersickness is solved and headsets are reduced to the size and cost of premium sunglasses, the navigation problem remains. On my consoles, two thumbsticks provide adequate control for most games. In VR you can use head position to adjust the viewport, but you need devices in your hands to navigate. Which means you can’t really use your hands like hands. And those controllers are more awkward than a conventional gaming controller.
At the end of the day, the whole Metaverse project strongly suggests that Mark really is a geek at heart. He is paying a vast number of engineers to work on a project that has little chance of commercial success. He will end up pushing advances in computational geometry, but I suspect that FB will disappear more quickly than it appeared.
Remember SecondLife ? Everybody was talking about it like the next big thing. Every corp. was creating its virtual space in SecondLife.
I don’t even know if it is still online, but I haven’t heard about it for years. I guess Metaverse will follow the same partern. People will test it out of curiosity, some will grow some addiction to it, some weird/dubious things will happen inside it, surely some people will make money out of it and some lives will be broken in the process, people will raise arms in the air saying what is the world going to, people will grow tired of it and realize real life is indeed better and then the bubble will deflate and almost everyone will forget about it.
Metaverse reminds me of Playstation Home. Remember that. Now Guttercrap has said you can invite who you want with no fear of security being breached. Good luck on that one. The xxxxheads will find a way and will get into your room. Then they can do their stuff like as in Home.
Facebook is uncool to new users and it isn’t great for advertisers. The only compelling thing about FB is its inertia.
Structurally, the problem with FAANGs is that their size and user base severely constrains innovation. You can make very very good money with a very easy job at a FAANG because all you can do is fine tune your small part of a massive machine.
Web3 is a much more interesting place to play. By being largely decentralized, Web3 creates an anarchic environment where people with ideas can try them out to see what works.
I’m not confident that Web3 is the future, but I expect that ideas will emerge from Web3 that will knock FB flat. Which is how things tend to work in technology development.
No one else is investing heavily in consumer VR, so FB can dominate that non-market until someone else comes along. I don’t think VR can save them, but it can pacify investors while the ad revenue continues to roll in.
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