Avoiding audience capture

Audience capture is a phenomenon common on social media where, over time, a creator loses their authentic voice and instead tailors their content to the desires of their audience as represented by engagement statistics.

Audience capture pushes creators toward "average" forms of expression. Average does not always mean "moderate"—many use audience capture to refer to content creators who find themselves in a loop of pushing their audience toward a political extremism that they have come to expect. Rather, audience capture means speaking toward an audience in a way that does not challenge or alienate them, that gives them what you think they expect, and specifically, what they expect from you, whether those expectations line up with your beliefs, interests and priorities.

Audience capture feels like a silent voice tugging a creator toward expressing themselves in a certain way, or about certain topics, such that the creator's work will receive "better engagement."

The ultimate danger of audience capture is when this voice becomes something that a creator does not recognize: when they have spent so much time on social media platforms that they have internalized "optimal" ways of presenting their thoughts, and begin to think "as the platform" does, rather than via their own authentic self-expression and without even noticing that they themselves have become a different person in order to serve the wants of their audience.

I very rarely post on Substack, as it is a platform I find highly susceptible to these dynamics. If you want to read most of my writing, you'll have to read it on this blog, a blog which I have zero audience metrics for and which I almost actively sabotage its ability to reach an audience, but which I know for absolute certain retains my voice and my ideas. Almost no one wants to read about the exact collection of topics that I cover here, but they are the topics that I am interested in and want to write about. If I posted them on a platform like Substack, I would feel the tug of a low-engagement post discouraging me from writing about, say, Magic: The Gathering to an audience that is largely uninterested in it.

Some people with stronger wills than me seem capable of using platforms without succumbing to audience capture. For myself, I find myself happy writing almost exclusively on this blog, where I am able to develop a voice, a style, a worldview, without worrying at all about audience metrics. Any feedback I have gotten on my blog writing has been in person or over email, feedback that is all the more valuable when I know that it is on something that I have complete certainty was not compromised in any way or written with an imagined audience in mind.