Why I Left Social Media and Still Beat the Algorithm
I left social media for the same reason people stop feeding slot machines: I got tired of watching it eat my quarters and call it “networking.”
For years I played the game like everyone else. Post a sketch at peak hours. Reply fast. Learn the new feature that promises reach. Put the right number of hashtags on the right day. Accept that the machine will randomly decide whether the thing I made with my hands is “worth” showing to people who asked to see it. Then, after all that ritual, accept the final indignity: whatever small attention trickles through isn’t mine. It belongs to the casino.
The casino is the culture. The casino is the timeline. The casino is the place where artists are told that if we just keep pulling, we’ll “hit” legitimacy. The house always wins.
So I quit the casino. I built a workshop.
The Great Casino Lie
Social media didn’t invent community. It invented metrics about community. It took the soft, human parts of making work—curiosity, care, time—and translated them into numbers the platform could sell. It told me that “being a professional” meant posting like a brand, optimizing like a marketer, and living in public like a reality show contestant who also happens to solder jump rings and draw.
And for a while, I believed it. If you make art in our era, you learn the catechism:
- If you’re not visible, you’re not real.
- If you’re not posting, you’re not working.
- If you won’t serve the algorithm, the algorithm will starve you.
The funny part is that the longer I stayed, the less I owned. Followers? Not mine. Feed? Not mine. Even the archive—my years of learning and process—felt rented, boxed in by a platform that could delete it, de-rank it, or lock me out the moment it needed a new KPI.
Artists aren’t inconsistent; we’re fluent. We change style because we’ve built range. We experiment because we’re alive. But on social platforms, range looks like brand confusion, and aliveness looks like inconsistency. The machine can’t read nuance; it can only tally it.
So I stopped performing for a machine that misreads me on purpose.
The Joke’s on Me (and Also the Joke Is Good)
Here’s the punchline: after bailing from social media in a blaze of “absolutely not,” I got really good at SEO.
Not the cardboard kind where you use ten thousand synonyms for “handcrafted artisan jewelry” and watch your site wilt. I mean the quiet kind—the infrastructural kind. The kind where you make the bones of your site strong, the paths clear, the copy human, and the pages fast enough without starving them of flavor.
I let the homepage open with my introduction instead of a generic “Home.” I tuned my navigation so it fits like clothing rather than armor. I embedded Ko-Fi in the Workshop page as a living window instead of bolting a tip jar onto a corner. I stopped pretending my site is “content” and started saying out loud: this is my livelihood. Please be respectful of where you’re standing.
And yep, the analyzer says “Very Good” (70). Could I chase a 99? Of course. But there’s a point where “optimized” becomes “lifeless,” and I’m not here to strip-mine my own voice so a crawler can compliment me. My job is to build a place where people can find the work, understand it quickly, and step closer if they want to be part of it. That’s enough. That’s plenty.
The lesson is not “escape the algorithm.” It’s “architect it.” The difference between gambling and engineering is consent.
The Workshop Model
The Workshop is not a metaphor. It’s a structure. It has rooms.
- The Threshold: the public website—Ottawa Valley Creations—where the colors belong to me, the typography speaks in my voice, and the navigation is a conversation, not a sales funnel.
- The Window: a Ko-Fi feed embedded like an actual pane of glass. People can look in and see that the place is alive—my human noise, my smaller updates, my hello, I’m still making things.
- The Floor: supporter posts—work in progress, process notes, older pieces, the slow unglamorous hours that make finished work possible. That’s not “content.” That’s craft.
- The Hall: finished pieces, priced honestly for the time and materials. Payment plans because equity matters. No pretending that everything should be cheap to be “accessible.” Accessibility is many doors, not one low price.
This model isn’t austere. It’s generous and sane. A $3 monthly door into the living part of the studio is not a contradiction next to a hundred-dollar piece on the table. One sustains the work; the other honors the result. Both are acts of care.
Professionalism Without the Timeline
The culture says: “If you’re not on Platform of the Month, are you even professional?”
I say: “Professionals build infrastructure.”
I still have a LinkedIn. You can look me up. I still visit the odd corner of the web that feeds me (hi, Tumblr, you stubborn old forest). But I don’t confuse existing on a platform with being a working artist. The signal for professionalism isn’t follower count; it’s continuity. It’s whether you have a place to stand and a way for people to stand with you.
My site is the place. Ko-Fi is the key. Email is the hallway. That’s it. That’s the ecosystem. No “growth hacks,” just doors that open into rooms I own.
But Doesn’t SEO Just Replace One Algorithm With Another?
Here’s the distinction: social media is an algorithm that moderates your relationships. SEO is an algorithm that moderates your roads.
I can’t control who a platform lets me talk to, or whether they see my work after they explicitly asked to. I can control whether someone searching for “handbeaded fox pendant Ottawa” lands on my page and finds an actual fox pendant and a human who made it.
SEO done humanely is not about groveling for PageRank. It’s about clarity:
- Write meta descriptions like you’re inviting someone into a room.
- Use headings to tell a story, not to impress a robot.
- Describe images so screen readers—and searchers—understand what’s there.
- Keep the pages fast enough without sanding off your personality.
If the algorithm is a weather system, I don’t argue with the rain. I build a roof.
The Ethics of Leaving
Whenever artists leave social media, there’s a whisper that it’s selfish or elitist—that we’re abandoning audiences who can only “find us” there. I think the opposite is true. Staying in a space that deranges attention and extracts labor while paying in confetti likes is the abandonment. It abandons the slow, communal logic of craft in favor of spectacle.
Leaving the casino is not leaving people. It’s refusing to let a machine sit between us and charge both sides a fee.
My site is public. My writing is public. My prices are public. My door is open. The difference is that I’m not paying a bouncer to decide who gets let in.
Field Notes From a Reformed Gambler
A few small, practical things I learned while rebuilding the workshop:
- Start with the greeting. Replace the default “Home” with your own introduction. A person arrived; speak like a person back.
- Treat links like signposts, not sales buttons. “Workshop,” “Essays,” “Shop”—simple words that act like doors.
- Respect the window. Public posts can be personality and presence without being the work itself. Let the noise prove you’re alive; keep the craft for those who step inside.
- Price honestly, not defensively. Payment plans are access. Low-cost patronage is access. Underpricing the finished work is not access; it’s extraction.
- Optimize until it still tastes like food. If your pages load quickly and your copy reads like you, you’re done. Anything after that is vanity metrics.
None of this is a growth hack. It’s a stance.
“Aren’t You Afraid of Disappearing?”
The only place we vanish is inside someone else’s feed. I’m easier to find now than I ever was because I’m not competing with a thousand dancing ads for the privilege of being seen by people who already wanted to see me.
Also—and I cannot stress this enough—there is peace in knowing that if I log off for a day, my work doesn’t vanish down a timeline. It sits where I left it, in rooms I arranged, reachable by roads I laid. That peace is worth more than any spike of “virality” I was ever offered.
Owning the Casino™
There’s a certain hilarity in saying “fuck the algorithm” and then building a site with beautiful metadata, semantic headings, and a tidy sitemap. But that’s the joke I’m happy to live inside. The trick isn’t to run from every system; it’s to choose the systems that make you more yourself.
Social platforms taught me to gamble for attention. SEO taught me to design attention’s path. Ko-Fi taught me that community is a door you unlock, not a prize you win. My own site taught me that permanence is an art form too.
I don’t want pity clicks. I don’t want to “hack” virality. I want a living hall of story and craft, a small economy of care, and a steady table to work at.
I’m done playing in the casino.
I own the Casino™—not because I beat the house at its own game, but because I stopped playing and built a house where people can actually come in, sit down, and see what’s being made.
The lights are on. The window’s open. If you want to step inside, the door is right there.
Got a laugh? My bills aren’t nearly as funny, but you can help through the Mutual Aid Fund or by exploring the Shop: Made by Me | Oddities & Convenience. If you’d like: you can follow us on Medium, itch.io, or on ko-fi as well.