Welcome to our social-media-free-online-biz-and-marketing links digest AKA the CLICK THRU!

This month’s round-up includes why views are lies, “millennial rebrand syndrome”, 21 reasons to leave social media, and more!

As always, this is a choose-your-own-adventure sort of endeavor. So you’re invited to dip your toe in one link at a time, dive into the deep end and open them all at once, or just hang out in the splash zone of the comments and see what surfaces there.

Please remember that I don’t necessarily know the folks who create the things I link to, and I definitely don’t endorse every single thing that every single person I mention writes, says, or shares.

And just in case you’re not on top of your pod feed lately… Off the Grid season six is in full swing! Here’s what we’ve published since the last CLICK THRU:

• 🫂 Escaping the Social Media Trance — Community + Agency with Elise Granata
• 💭 Radical Imagination in Hard Times — with Sarah Arantza Amador
• 💏 You CAN Make Friends Without Social Media — with Caitlin Metz & Rebekah Taussig
• 🙅‍♂️ How to Stop Feeling Stuck on Social Media — with Deanna deBara
• 📢 Amplifying Attention for Under-Recognized Voices (Including Yourself!) — with Cher Hale
• ✊ Making the Movement Irresistible — Leaving Social Media with Edgar Fabián Frías

OK on to our ninth CLICK THRU + I’ll see you in the comments!

🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗

WHAT’S UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

👀 The Verge is reporting that “views are lies” — so maybe all social metrics are vanity metrics now?

📱 ICYMI Substack has rolled out a Tiktok-esque video feed in their app

😡 Reading Careless People taught me a lot about censorship on Facebook, so I was appalled-but-not-surprised to see how Israel is using takedown requests to censor Palestinian resistance

🚮 The title of this Youtube essay pretty much covers it — “social media is TRASH now, thanks tech bros!!”

ONLINE BIZ & CONTENT CREATION

♻️ If you host online communities, you’ll definitely want to read this research from The Verge on how the internet is shifting to smaller more curated spaces