One more: I’ve got a small print shop/publishing business. I’m interested in printing vinyl stickers but searching for “what machines should I be looking for and how should I judge them” has been an awful experience going face first into search engines.
But on TikTok, there are multiple small shops showing the machines they use, and how they use them on the daily. Talking about the problems they run into.
Never thought I’d be stanning for TikTok, but it’s really not just dancing and thirst traps.
There are so many excellent creators on it. Nature focused. Rare book dealers showing their wares. Medievalists. And trades, showing you how things work (herding sheep, thatching roofs, general home repairs). Not to mention all the artists (drawing, painting, sculpting, pottery, stained glass, sewing, etc).
It really excels in the area of photoshop/illustrator tutorials as well. None of the YouTube bloat, just a quick 1 minute video that shows you exactly how to do one cool thing.
Yes the cool stuff is buried under dancing teenagers spitting memes, but there’s exceptional creative stuff on there and an audience that buys that stuff.
Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people.
"Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out."
It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party.
Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature.
Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed.
Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people.
Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it.
As a self publisher who’s used Kickstarter for 4 books now, let me say: the creative side of writing the books, doing the layout, getting it print ready, coordinating with artists etc is a beast.
Then when you add on the publisher side of distribution, fulfillment, lost orders, customer service, marketing etc you have a whole other beast.
It’s manageable in the right circumstances, and pieces can be sort of automated or out sourced, but (at least for me) the other grinds begin to absolutely kill my ability to do the creative work. And meanwhile fans are like “omg when’s the next book coming out?!?!?”
That’s said, I think the publishing “industry” needs to be ripped down and overhauled, but the work a publisher needs to do is very valuable and different than the creative needs.
But on TikTok, there are multiple small shops showing the machines they use, and how they use them on the daily. Talking about the problems they run into.