Searching For A Save Point (Continued...): subvert.fm/dutchyyy is live but...

Did alot of revision work to prepare for this launch (stuff in my master vault to do list anyway) from Audio refinement, artwork, thumbnails, video editing, formatting.. I have thoughts around the launch of this platform and the success, longevity of new things in this post algo driven world, but those can be here:

https://zora.co/coin/base:0x65e1cc37830d4770faf00ab3a62f935aa8a73e9e?referrer=0x26ef03a20aaeda8aafcee4e146dc6b328195947c

Along with the video I put some care and time into for launch, which I don't feel was optimized or well executed now that launch day has passed and i guess i'll touch on that a bit.

Here is communication from subvert:

"Subvert is now live. Here's what we need from you: Share your custom image on social. Tag us. Link to your artist page → Download your image here. Add your Subvert artist page to your Linktree. Share your artist page with your audience, your community, your friends. Text three artists to join us in the co-op. Thank you for being part of this. This is what a co-op is. Everyone chipping in, doing what we can, in service of the broader collective. Subvert started as an idea. Today, it's a working platform owned and controlled by artists. We're sending a message. We are showing what cooperative music infrastructure looks like in practice. It's only the beginning. More to come. Sincerely Ours, Subvert"

Before I touch on this, some key reminders of context: I "Dutch" have decades of applied experience across the constantly evolving digital landscape and how "marketing" has been leveraged and experimented with as that landscape continues to reshape, when I see a email like this from a label, platform, etc... It transports to multiple moments across time, The age of street teams and gorilla marketing, the blog era, but most specifically the early pre-2015 soundcloud era and the rise of the "collectives" - Power in numbers and all that jazz, lift all tides type beat.

An avengers style of musicians with existing clout mixed with emerging undeniable talents all coming to together to form like voltron was a cheatcode in it's early phase...

When and how this fell apart both on soundcloud and in general (you see any popular collectives making noise these days? nope) was when soundcloud added the repost feature, as it was quickly gamed and abused by "repost chains" but when it specifically fell apart was when soundcloud removed the extra feed for reposts and shoved them into the following feed, effectively burying what you already know you want to hear with noise, repost in theory is healthy... you get to experience the taste and discover new stuff from trusted sources.... but it was used in this manner, it was abused and manipulated so quickly...

How this pertains to Subvert launch, or zora or any other platform clearly trying to leverage it's core and early audience to do the heavy lifting is whether you grasp, care or even acknowledge how algorithms now factor into literally all digital social squares... Algo's exist, and exempt of any proprietary custom differences between platforms... they are all kingmaker style and engagement / metric weighted....

across all platforms, one of the heaviest weighted rules of engagement below watch time retention is what happens when an account chooses to @ / tag a specific user, most importantly what happens behind the hood if the person who is mentioned, does not meaningfully engage after being tagged, even a delayed meaningful response (not a like, not an emoji, but a comment + repost) is calculated when determining the "value" of the original poster. Never engaging deals high damage, and repeated attempts do even more damage to the overall account who dared to signal boost / connect directly.

This is why while i greatly love the concept of "bopping.to" it's a well intentioned service but by design (tagging musicians and artists on spotify that will likely never engage with these posts) it's intention of signal boosting and discovery actually punishes those who use it, like i said katy perry is not likely to ever engage, times that by 3, for each post... that's alot of negative weighted engagement being racked up to determine and dictate if your voice deserves to be heard or show even to your own followers, so at bare minimum, bopping should be meaningfully engaging and reposting every post that tags them, which is all since it's automated.... This is alot of work, and also cringe... It's not ideal nor realistic, but it doesn't change the validity or reality in how and why engagement based algorithms being treated like a black box and not understanding and applying action based on the universal coded rules because it just feels cringe, exhausting and not realistic is the reason any platform or business that relies on leveraging it's users to grow, or even be discoverable cannot be "too cool for school" when it comes to meaningfully and consistently engaging with the ones they are lucky enough to have mentioning the thing they hope to grow......

This is very much and particularly the most important step if your goal as business / product is designed around the discovery and exchange of culture..... because users you need to exist, lose leverage you need when you actively harm their ability to reach their own audience.... and beyond the just practical common sense of the value word of mouth has for what you've built, you are also just harming the creators you built for in the first place.....

Algo's suck, monoculture is dead, everyone is so quick to cope that this is normal (it is what it is) stage of tech and culture evolution and will write substacks on why you should just adapt..... but engagement based algos aren't an abstract concept..... it's binary rules that exist and rule the digital landscape.....

There is no workaround, except the ones that respect the game, and then break and manipulate how broken this system is......

Just ask the "lookmaxing" community... and clippers....

It's Dutchyyy VS The Algorithms for a reason haha...

It's understandable the common internet user, doesn't care, understand or acknowledge the true nightmare of engagement based algorithms.... but if you're building things for people and don't have infinite runway for marketing and operations.....

respect and execute the rules of the machine gods of discovery and stop skipping over how much power not engaging has over the things and people that @ you at bare minimum.

Thanks for Reading.

Thanks for Reading. <3