used to be very into reddit in my edgelord high schooler years. at some point it dawned on me that the general vibe there is pretty negative, at least on the main feed there’s prolly some lovely little subreddit communities out there. I started to realize that I didn’t enjoy the experience of being on the site, the memes felt very self-referential (making memes about memes for the sake of making more memes, it didn’t make for very stimulating content), and the interest based communities felt more argumentative than friendly discussion. it felt like I spent hours scrolling to find something that would hold my interest beyond the malaise of r/me_irl type posts and the same repeat r/askreddit threads.
eventually i figured out that i could find what i liked about reddit elsewhere (got really into youtube video essays) and that I felt better using my time differently. had a similar thought process with twitter a few years ago too. i still have a reddit account for the few times it pays to find niche info on specific subreddits, but I haven’t browsed regularly in probably 8 years.
May 17, 2024
Related Recs
❓
It was daunting at first to leave a place I regularly posted on for 10+ years and made so many connections through, but I don’t even think about it at this point. It became such a cesspool of bad vibes in the past couple years.
Mar 6, 2024
📵
it’s so horrible for your brain and self image and i’m sure it’s just gotten more hellish since 2016. i save photos i like to an album (u can now add captions to photos on iphone) that is my social media for myself. and i also just text people or more often wait for them to text me since im bad at reaching out. i truly do not miss it at all.
i however am not perfect and will do my share of doomscrolling on youtube shorts which is bad for my brain but at least doesnt affect my self esteem since there is no community of my peers, i feel no urge to post, and the algorithm is so bad nothing is ever very targeted/relevant. you will be surprised how quickly you stop thinking and wondering about it and how good and free it will make you feel, i have quite literally never looked back.
Mar 3, 2025
🤌
I decided to shift to using my main instagram account to exclusively browse and engage with other music related accounts. So I made a second private finsta and I’ve just been sending anything in my feed that isn’t music there and unfollowing from the music account. Meanwhile on the new account, I’m telling every single reel it shows me whether it interests me or not.
Already, I’m seeing less celebrity worship or cosmetic surgery content or clickbaity stuff etc etc that I otherwise might have just mindlessly engaged with despite not caring about and not wanting to see more of. I feel weirdly empowered for the first time ever to shape my social media experience rather than simply attempt to avoid altogether this thing that makes me feel like my brain is rotting. And another upside is that my music account seems to be getting more engagement from accounts that don’t already follow me on the music related content that I post. Wish I’d done this a long time ago, I feel like it’s what a lot of artists already were doing but I stubbornly wanted to keep everything in one place for so long.
I don’t think I’ll post to the other one at all I just want to be able to look at like memes and recipes and visual art without confusing the algorithm of what’s intended to be a professional account . I’ll prolly still steal and then post said memes on the ”professional” account tho because that’s just the kind of professionalism I exhibit in my important work as a DIY musician.
Dec 30, 2024
Top Recs from @royallmonarch
6d ago
📴
I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order.
so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data.
Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music.
so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason.
aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume
Feb 29, 2024
4d ago