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How a small business, creator or politician can be independent of big platforms in the AI age
Are you a content creator playing by the rules of YouTube, Instagram or Google? Are you a small business owner whose business model depends on how often Amazon recommends you, how expensive Facebook ad impressions will be or how expensive Google Ads clicks will be? If all or most of your contact with your audience or customers depends on a big platform showing you to them, you are not in a strong position.
Politics is one example. I do not want to defend particular politicians, but today big platforms can seriously weaken someone in a political fight by reducing their reach or suspending their account.
Today big platforms can copy the products of small businesses that sold on them, and then put their own copies first in search results.
Today big AI companies use what we create with their tools to learn how to deliver better services, so that in the next version of the model they can offer it as something they can easily do on their own.
On social media, we, the people, and our attention are the product that is sold to companies. To companies that advertise on the platform or want to analyse our data, but also to AI companies that want to use what we create on social media to train their models.
On big AI platforms, we are only a source of training data. We improve AI models by using them to create things that are useful in practice. And not only do we do it for free, we even pay for it.
We pay social media platforms so that our own followers see us. And we create content for them for free, which they then sell to others, for example for training AI models, as mentioned above.
Big tech companies like this model and do not want us to leave them or move our contact with our audience elsewhere. Anyone who publishes something that leads people away from the platform is put at a disadvantage. Platforms do it step by step, for example by reducing reach or by making it completely impossible to put a clickable link in a post. And that is in Europe or America. In China, for example, the social network Xiaohongshu forbids users to write a WeChat ID or links to other platforms in their posts.
If our contact with our audience is built almost entirely on big platforms, they can dictate terms like these, because we depend on them.
How can you free yourself from big platforms and social media?
Your own communication channels
Your own website and domain. Treat big platforms only as a gateway through which you invite your audience to come to you. One example is this blog, which I started ten years ago so that I would not depend on social media.
Your own email channel. About a year ago I decided to send a regular newsletter, always on the first Sunday of the month.
RSS. Readers subscribe to your content directly. What they see is not decided by the algorithm of the big social networks. Every one of my articles is in the RSS feed, which you can add to your RSS reader.
Your own online shop instead of a marketplace. For ten years I have worked for a company that, thanks to its own online shop, is independent of big marketplaces and price comparison websites. To me, that makes a lot of sense.
Direct payment. I recommend that content creators accept payment directly on their own website or app instead of earning through a platform that sets the terms. That is why I sell access to my Library directly on my own website.
Platforms as a gateway to you
Invite people from every social network to come to you, to your website, your app or your own communication channel. In my social media posts I link to my articles, and next to every article you can sign up for the newsletter.
Do not rely on one big platform or social network. Then a blocked account or a change in the algorithm will not put you in a critical situation. I post on several networks at once and actively try to build visibility in search engines and in AI chat services.
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Join the Library · €29.99 per year What should I study in the age of AI?… I Left My Job for Several Months to Read… How I Fell in Love With Her, at First… How do you stop depending on social media? Can… How to Start With AI in a Company: Automating… Fable 5 vs Opus: I Ran the Same Audit…Get the full article by email and feel free to reply if you want to discuss it further.
Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
How do I become independent of social media?
Why is depending on big platforms risky?
How can a small online shop work without Amazon and marketplaces?
How can a politician be independent of social media?
What are the IndieWeb and webmentions?
Will social media bring traffic to my website?
Which social network can you leave with your followers?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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