to post or not to post?

fanfiction maximalism, shaming people for instagramming their lunches, and whether or not it's gauche to post nowadays

Since 2023, I’ve been in variable states of chronically offline. I’d had an especially hard month and decided to get off of all social media for a vacation week, and then that vacation week turned into two weeks, a month, six months. I did eventually go back - part of me thinks going back is inevitable, not in a trap way but in a reminding myself of what this stuff actually is, not what thinkpieces or my own brain corrupt it to be way - but those spans of offline time have meant that I don’t feel a need to post. If I go on vacation, I have no real intention of putting the pictures I take on Instagram, and I’m cool with that. People who follow my socials probably have no idea what I’m up to. After being raised with Spotify linked to your Facebook, with status updates and pictures of your dinner posted on Instagram, I feel like this is a rational, adult response. No one needs to know what I just ate. No one needs to know what music I’m listening to right this very second. I don’t need to project my identity onto the internet.

But recently, I’ve longed for online community, and community requires interaction and participation. The best parts of the internet tend to be the ones that culminate in real-life friendships and bring people together at in-person events, and I can’t really go through the “online friends to IRL friends” process if I don’t at least start with the online part first. And I have a number of interests that I can’t discuss with real-life friends. People in my area just don’t care about these things, and that’s fine! That’s why the internet is great! But in order to be a part of the internet’s greatness, I need to post. And I really, genuinely feel resistant toward posting.

I saw an Instagram Reel recently talking about the concept of “Google zero,” the concept that, once Google’s AI summaries become ubiquitous for internet searches, traffic to the websites from which the AI sources its data will dramatically decrease, thus dramatically decreasing traffic altogether. I think something similar can be said of Instagram; as the platform moved away from “the people you went to high school with” and toward a more influencer-centric profit entertainment situation, I’ve barely posted at all while spending more time than in prior years watching cat videos on the platform. And I love the cat videos. I’m not parting with the cat videos. But Instagram has made me into only a consumer. There is nothing valuable that I do on that website, so I have a seven-minute time limit per instance of opening the app, just long enough to see the cat videos I love but not long enough to get into the weeds of comment sections. Still, I’ll never be able to build community on Instagram. Plenty of people do, but it’s not going to happen for me. How could it if I don’t post?

After getting on Substack, I’ve seen a different side of social media. A side that’s smaller and less hyperconsumeristic but still undeniably social media and not so small as to be empty. Something I’ve really appreciated about Substack is that even in the seemingly low-effort and potentially toxic Notes section, I’ve ended up with book recommendations, sights to see, and vacation plans. A trip I took to New York City recently featured a lot of the stuff I’d seen on Substack, including the Moomin exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library and the “treasures” collection in the New York Public Library, both of which were free to see. Most of these recommendations aren’t corporate; a sponsorship would rake in a lot more money on a different social media platform, so these recommendations feel more honest and less hell-bent on becoming viral. I like this! It feels expansive, not implosive. But all of these recommendations came from posts. From people interacting on social media or shouting into the ether. If the posts slow down - or if the posts become increasingly corporatized, or increasingly about profit - then I won’t have this valuable resource anymore. I’ll be stuck with ads instead, and who wants to be stuck with ads?

Still, I hesitate to post. My most recent Instagram post is from August, the one before that being from more than a year prior; I put up pictures of a crazy cool bookstore I ended up at by coincidence, a place that describes itself as “open by appointment or by chance,” and my chance encounter with the place was too good not to talk about. The place is chock-full of first editions from the previous owner’s arguable hoard, so as you navigate three floors of books, you see everything. On the off-chance that anyone who followed me on Instagram was in the area, they needed to go to this shop. But even when I went to make that post, I wondered why I should bother. Who cares that I went to a bookstore? But I didn’t care if people cared; I just wanted anyone going to that town to know that it has a cool bookstore off the beaten path. I didn’t even post what I bought, just posted pictures of some of the interesting book spines I’d seen on that day. I wasn’t trying to flex or brag, but my brain still wondered why I thought I was so important. I was just sharing a bookstore picture! What’s wrong with that?

hey, it was a pretty cool bookstore…and the picture is grainy because i screenshotted it from my instagram. authenticity!

I think the early 2010s were a bit of a sweet spot for social media, in which it didn’t dominate our lives but in which the posts mattered. There weren’t influencers vying for attention at all times. We all had an assumption that, after a certain point, we would need to log off. So, we put a lot of food pictures on Instagram. We all thought adding a filter to a picture made us into photographers. And then, people got hateful, so this self-indulgent - and frankly embarrassing at times - posting became gauche. If you get a nice dinner and take a picture of it, there better be a long caption talking about how much money you spent and how artistic the meal was! There is no reason to preserve your $7 panang curry out of a takeout container on the internet forever, no matter how good it tasted. Your projected identity better be quiet! If you’re posting and not making money off of those posts, you better be nice about how you waste the time of the mindless automatons staring at your feed.

Strangely, the people I see posting most often beyond the influencer sphere tend to be people trying their best to look like influencers even though they obviously will never end up in that career. The captions on a baby picture go beyond standard information shared with family members and into something more performative that may not even realize it’s performative. The details get intimate to the point that I feel like this really should be kept private. First-time parents are particularly egregious; every bodily function of their baby’s is fodder for the Social Media Machine, even though this kind of oversharing is both deeply cringe and exploitative of the child. There should be some privacy even on a protected Instagram account, right? And who is this post meant for exactly? It’s too much sharing for even immediate family members, and the baby in question would rather not have this preserved on the internet forever, so the post must be for the parent’s own ego. And it’s cringe to boost your own ego! They should be embarrassed, right? But they should only be embarrassed because they’re oversharing without a profit motive. They should only be embarrassed because there’s no “greater reason” to force others to read such things.

And then, I see people I went to high school with making second accounts on the same email address as their first, and then, I end up with those new accounts recommended to me, and I wish instead those accounts would be deliberately not shown to people who follow the main account. I don’t want to know that someone I met a long time ago is trying to become a golf influencer, and I’m fairly certain she doesn’t want me to know that either. Leave her alone! Let her get her coin! I hope she gets free clubs and visors and whatever else people use for golf! But also, it’s embarrassing to admit you want free stuff, brand deals, and notoriety to the people who follow you already because, to them, you are a whole, real person, not a walking advertisement. It’s too vulnerable for the people you know in real life to watch you start performing your hobby in hope that more people will follow you and eventually let you sell them something. The shift from person to brand can make people you know cringe as they watch, but you’re not performing brand for those people; you’re performing brand for people who share your hobby or listen to your insights. Maybe it’s a form of selling out, but it’s selling out rooted in some kind of connection. I can cringe while watching others do that, but I still think they should have every right to do that.

At some point, I think developing a personal brand as an internet user will be inevitable for me. I don’t want to do it, but I think that’s the cost of trying to find others with similar interests and trying both to start communities online and to join communities that are already thriving. Yes, this is a way of marketing an identity for myself, of performing my own personality, so it feels inauthentic and kind of chronically online, but I don’t think there’s another option. I think, to some degree, I do have to perform. It’s a means to an end, not an attempt to gain attention. Instead of being the kind of person on a dating app who says “I like going on adventures” and similarly empty statements that imply they don’t actually do anything, I need to beef up my projected personality. I need to condense into a bite-size profile the fact that, like, I knit and stuff. It would be more egotistical to pretend this posturing is beneath me. It would be worse to sit on a not posting pedestal as someone who simply isn’t that interesting.

I have a number of Substack newsletters written that I fear may stay in my drafts forever. When I try to finish them, I can’t help wondering why I should bother posting. Do I really think my thoughts are that interesting? Is there a point to putting my writing on the platform? I’ll write regardless of whether or not anyone can - or should - read my writing, so why not just let the writing stay in my drafts? But the majority of my internet writing up until now - it’s embarrassing but essential to admit - has been fanfiction, and I’ve never felt this way about posting fanfiction.

One of my most popular fanfictions - it’s the most kudos’d work in the tag, if I can’t brag about that on a CV, then I need to brag about it somewhere - was one I had never intended to post, but once my draft reached 40,000 words, I figured I was being a little selfish keeping it to myself. The tag was dead anyway; if someone else was refreshing the page in the same way I was, then maybe I would make their day. In the fanfiction sphere, less is never more. Readers relish in seeing the same plot posted for the hundredth time. It’s a community of people desperate for more from their media. Whether you’re a teenager, a non-native English speaker, a parent, a hack, or more of a fan than a writer, your fanfiction will probably end up being appreciated by someone.

So, it’s funny to feel as if that’s the only space where my writing ought to go, but at the same time, I understand why: it’s hard to have an ego, or to even seem like you have an ego, in fanfiction communities. Or, if someone does have an ego, they kind of look like an asshole. I can’t help wondering how the social internet would be different if the same principles applied. If everyone did want to know what you had for lunch. If everyone did want to know what music you’re listening to right now. Is this not the function of a close friends story? Close friends do want to know those things.

But at the same time, I like being in communities with internet strangers, and maybe with those strangers my posts should be higher effort. For those people, I’ll post what I’m sewing and write a clear and concise review of the pattern I used. I’ll contribute more to the conversation because the community requires me to. I’ll project my identity and personality in a short personal brand so that a cursory look at my profile tells the reader all they need to know. It’s not posturing to talk about a hobby around those who want to hear other people talk about that same hobby. And more than anything else, I need to keep reminding myself that, as of right now, absolutely no one reads my Substack, and therefore, I should throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, not for the readers’ sake but for mine. I’ll never find a voice if I don’t actually try to find a voice. In this case, there is no growth in the drafts. And no one’s reading, so who cares what happens? Maybe I’ll look like a fool, but I’ll look like a fool in front of no one. How liberating! It kind of makes me hope people won’t follow.

It’s vulnerable to post. Posting opens me up to a lot of criticism I frankly don’t want to deal with. But for now, I’m getting no criticism whatsoever because no one is reading. What a perfect time to try things out! What a great moment for some personal growth! For now, there’s no need to keep anything in the drafts. More is more. I don’t need to care about whether or not my work is worth reading because no one is reading it. I can post to my heart’s content, even if my heart is content posting nothing. No one is watching. I am simply not that interesting.

If someone does tune in, that’s their business, not mine. My only job is to write. To find my voice. To be open and available to any community that may arise. And community will never, never be found in the drafts.