Short boughs, long vintage, and email

It was four years before Twitter or Facebook hit 100 million users. Instagram did it in two. TikTok got there in nine months. Threads reached the milestone in less than seven days. We’ve reached S-tier bandwagoning. And I don’t think that’s all bad!

Social media comes with more than a few negative externalities, sure. However, the parade of new high-growth, high-churn platforms is a tremendous opportunity to run short, low-risk experiments to grow your audience and shift to email, the safest harbor online for the last few decades. There’s nothing wrong with buying a scratch-off lottery every once and a while, as long as you're maxing out your 401k contributions every month.

Take the story of Sam Fiorella, for example. He didn’t sign up for Klout because he was curious or amused by the app’s promise of a number that tallied his influence across the web. Sam did it because a company he had applied to chose another candidate over him specifically because Sam’s Klout score was too low. So he signed up and trudged his way to a higher ranking without realizing the platform had already begun its swift decline into obscurity and without building credibility online outside of social media sharecropping.

Again, a social media lottery ticket isn’t always a bad play. The payoff in new followers, traffic, and new friends if you’re lucky can be worth the cost of admission, when it’s only a small fraction of your time. Many Buttondown users grow their lists by investing time in algorithmic platforms. Ultimately, though, Naval Ravikant summed it up nicely when he tweeted, “All self-help boils down to ‘choose long-term over short-term.’" For self-promotion, that means email.

Every platform is at its half-life

The Lindy Effect is a comically unreliable yet immensely helpful rule that says a non-perishable item–like a platform or protocol–is always approximately halfway to its demise. It would estimate that in December 2024, Threads was a year and a half away from being shuttered. I wouldn’t take that bet. What would be safe, however, is to use Lindy estimates as a heuristic for deciding how much time to spend on growing your audience across multiple platforms.

Commercially available email has been around for 30+ years. It’s a deeply rooted two-sided network, with 4.3 billion senders and receivers. If Betamax production could last until 2016, email is likely nowhere near its half-life. But as a triangulation coordinate alongside other Lindy estimates, a 30-year time horizon works well enough.

Take a self-published author growing their following across an email newsletter, an Instagram profile, and a Threads account. They might tally those lifespans (30 years + 14 + 1) and spend an amount of time on each platform that is proportional to its Lindy longevity. It’s simple, specific, and a heck of a lot better than just wingin’ it.

Like any rule of thumb, timeboxing with Lindy has its issues. Has X been around for 18 years or one? Can you really apply Lindy to anything released by Google? I don’t know! What I do know is that a newsletter list is yours to lose; a social profile isn’t yours at all.

The tortoise and the hare

Every social media platform eventually ends up incentivizing short-term engagement spikes over long-term relationships. And FOMO on the former is a major reason people stick around longer than they should. But even when you time your bandwagoning perfectly, joining when growth is exponential and posting something viral, you’re still left with nothing of transferable value.

“It almost feels like I’m getting a taste of celebrity, but it’s never consistent and as soon as you get it, it’s gone and you’re constantly trying to get it back,” is how Lauren Stasyna described her TikTok videos to the New York Times. Staysna (and everyone earning money off the platform) is at the whim of the algorithm and, crucially, its continued existence.

When you go viral on TikTok, you have no guarantee that your next post will be seen by a single person. None. Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm. With a newsletter, you can estimate with reasonable certainty how many people will receive your email. So, go ahead, sign up for new platforms. Be an early adopter and ride the diffusion of innovation wave to further reach and higher engagement. But implore your True Fans to follow you to safer waters. Convert them into newsletter subscribers so you (and they) can spend more time on the channel with the longest projected lifespan.

You might even commit to leaving the platform early as something of a filtering function. Only the people who really care will jump ship. If you’re worried about the fallout from a premature exit, build it into a new profile from day one. Pick a topic or an event with an expiration date and explain the terms of your exit, like a pop-up newsletter for social media. Then, before you archive the profile, tell them where they can find you online, where your content will remain as long as you choose to keep it going.

A big anchor and a small telescope

One of the convenient parallels with Lindy timeboxing is the idea of barbell investing. As Nassim Taleb’s describes it, “put 90 percent of your funds in boring cash...and 10 percent in maximally risky, securities.” Similar to deciding how much time to spend on each platform based on its current half-life. That would translate into calling it quits on “middle-aged” platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn in exchange for a few hours per week on Bluesky, Threads, or whatever has been released since I published this.

Worst case, an algorithmic rug pull turns into some trivial amount of wasted time. Best case, you stumble across a new cohort of diehard fans. Of course, a newsletter that never takes off is possible and would be an overall loss too. It’s not a self-promotion nostrum. But for as long as there are low-cost cloud-based email servers for hire, you will own your list and your archive.

Email as homestead

I think it’s pretty incredible that a humble newsletter could easily outlast a VC-funded platform when both were launched on the same day. So go forth and bandwagon! Sign up, post, share, and feed the social media machine. But don’t neglect the sliver of the internet that’s yours and yours alone. Don’t spend more time worrying about organic reach than open rates. Don’t waste time on fragile channels that divorce you from your audience graph. And if you do snag a lottery ticket that pays out, don’t let it ride! Convert new followers into newsletter subscribers and walk.

John Brandon predicted in a 2015 Inc.com article that “a new communication channel will replace email by 2020,” pointing to the popularity of since-shuttered or repurposed services like Meerkat and Campfire. “We won't even bother putting an email address on a business card,” he announced, nearly a decade before Nate Silver quipped that newsletters will continue to grow in popularity.

All self-promotion advice boils down to building long-term relationships over short-term connections. And the repeated predictions of email’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Header Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash