Why I Deleted Social Media

I recently made the decision to delete my social media, and there really wasn’t one dramatic moment that caused it. It was more about becoming self-aware of what social media had become for me and deciding where I wanted to go from here as an artist, musician and creator.

When I first started using social media, it was exciting.

I could share my artwork, music or an outdoor adventure and actually find people from around the area who were interested in the same things. Locality tags actually seemed to work. You could post a photograph from a fishing trip and people who fished those same waters might find it. You could share a piece of artwork or a song and people genuinely engaged with it.

It felt social.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

I first really started noticing it around 2018 when I had an outdoors page where I shared my fishing and hunting adventures. I could catch an amazing fish, take what I thought was a great photograph and post it, only to have almost no discovery or engagement at all.

At the same time, you started noticing certain types of content gaining followers incredibly fast. It became obvious that simply sharing something interesting wasn’t necessarily enough anymore.

So I did what I think a lot of us did.

I tried harder.

And that was probably where the bigger problem began.

Instead of simply creating something because I wanted to create it, I slowly started thinking about how I was going to post it.

With artwork, I started noticing trends where artists weren’t simply showing their finished work anymore. There would be a whole presentation around revealing it. An artist might stand there holding the artwork toward themselves and then slowly turn it around toward the camera.

Eventually it started feeling like the artwork itself wasn’t enough. The artist had to become part of the content too.

Music went in the same direction.

I started thinking about different places where I could record a song specifically because of how it might look on social media. And I’ll be the first to admit that I fell into that trap.

You start thinking about views.

You start thinking about likes.

You start thinking about the setting.

I’ve seen musicians standing in rivers or playing instruments in places where you would never normally expect someone to be playing a guitar. Maybe some people genuinely want to do that, and that’s fine. But I started recognizing that I was thinking along those same lines myself.

Where can I record this?

How can I make this more interesting?

What will make someone stop scrolling?

At some point I realized I wasn’t thinking enough about the most important question:

Do I actually enjoy making this?

That was what bothered me the most.

It started taking away some of my enjoyment because suddenly it felt like I wasn’t making things purely because I had a passion for making them. I was thinking about the content that would come from them and how I was going to post it.

Creating something and creating “content” are not necessarily the same thing.

I also started realizing just how much time could go into all of it. You make something, photograph it, record it, edit it, prepare the post and put it online.

And for what?

Something that can disappear with the click of a button.

Something controlled by an algorithm.

Something where you’re constantly wondering whether anyone is even going to see it unless you pay to promote it.

That isn’t how I want to measure the value of something I’ve created.

So I’ve decided to focus more of my attention here, on my own website and journal.

I want one place where I can build a portfolio of my artwork, music, photographs, outdoor adventures and whatever else I decide to create. A place I control.

No worrying about likes.

No worrying about an algorithm.

No feeling that something wasn’t successful because a number beside a little heart wasn’t high enough.

Just the satisfaction of creating.

And the funny thing is, I still love technology.

I still love the World Wide Web.

I’ve been enjoying this strange, amazing thing we call the internet since the 1990s, and I’m certainly not walking away from it.

In the early 2000s, I had my own website that I designed from scratch. I taught myself HTML and built the thing myself. There was a real sense of accomplishment in knowing that I had created my own little place on the internet and put it out there for the world to find.

Looking back, there was an innocence to that era of the web that I miss.

There weren’t all of these precalculated ideas about views, algorithms, engagement and monetization running through my head.

I was a musician who had made something, and the internet gave me the opportunity to share it with a broader audience.

That alone was exciting.

Today almost everything online seems to have found a way to become monetized. Views become numbers. Followers become numbers. Attention becomes something to sell.

I don’t want to think about my creativity that way anymore.

I’d rather have someone intentionally come to my website because they actually want to see what I’ve been making than worry about how many people briefly scrolled past something in a feed.

I’m also finding myself drawn more toward tangible things.

I want to create my own CDs again.

I want to make physical artwork.

I want to take that artwork to art shows, craft shows and festivals and actually put something I’ve made into someone’s hands.

That feels meaningful to me.

I’m not disappearing from the internet either. I still plan to use YouTube for my music, artwork and outdoor adventures. But video is different for me because I genuinely love videography. I love cameras. I love editing. I love telling a story through a lens.

That is part of the creation itself.

Maybe that distinction is really what all of this comes down to.

I don’t want to create things because I need something to post.

I want to share things because I created something I genuinely wanted to make.

And if someone asks whether leaving social media will hurt me as an artist or musician, I don’t really see it that way. There wasn’t much genuine engagement there for me anymore anyway.

I’d rather put that time into making another piece of artwork.

Recording another song.

Taking another photograph.

Writing another entry here.

I don’t know what the internet will look like ten years from now, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel differently about social media.

But I know where I am right now.

For me, success as an artist isn’t the number of followers I have.

It isn’t likes.

It isn’t views.

It isn’t beating an algorithm.

Success is simply creating.

And I think I had to step away from social media to remember that.

© Nathaniel Maloney. All rights reserved.