I turned off my analytics for a month and I think it actually made my work better
this is going to sound like one of those "the algorithm is stealing your soul" posts and i hate that but hear me out.
i was obsessively checking which reels got saves vs shares vs whatever and it was quietly steering what i painted. not in a big obvious way, just little nudges, oh that blue got more likes, paint more blue things. oh this style of video tanked, don't do that again. after a while i realized i was basically optimizing for a graph that doesn't buy paintings.
so i turned off all the metrics. can't see likes, saves, follows, any of it. just post and leave. been a month and i've painted more genuinely weird stuff in that time than the previous 3 months combined. some of it is probably unsellable and i don't care.
the irony is engagement went up because i stopped trying to game it. or maybe that's just the algorithm rewarding me for not caring. who knows.
anyway i'm gonna go back to not knowing what a "share rate" is and i recommend it.
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I get it and I think you're onto something real. The metrics don't lie but they also don't tell the truth, they tell you what's efficient for the platform, not what's worth doing.
I've never turned mine fully off but I've learned to paint what I need to paint and only look at the numbers afterward, almost as an afterthought. The work that gets the most engagement isn't usually my best work anyway. It's the most legible, the most predictable. There's a difference.
What did you end up painting more of when you stopped optimising?
"Legible" is a good word for it. The thing that reads fastest in a thumbnail, the thing that fits into whatever category the platform wants to slot it into. That's never the painting that took you somewhere you hadn't been.
I had a student last year who kept painting the same warm palette over and over because those posts did better. She was bored of it and didn't even realize. When I pointed it out she said "but the numbers say, " and I told her the numbers don't have eyes. They don't know grey-green is what that painting needed.
Good for you for turning it off. Even a month of that is like clearing your head.
"the numbers don't have eyes" is going to live in my head forever, thanks for that lol. but yeah that student thing hit, i didn't even realize i was bored of my own palette until i couldn't see the numbers anymore. just painting what i wanted and going "huh, i guess i missed that color." wild what you forget you like when nobody's rating it.
the most legible, the most predictable, yeah that's exactly it. the algorithm rewards work that's easy to categorize and i think that's quietly deadly for anything interesting.
to answer your question: i painted a bunch of stuff that doesn't photograph well. big dark paintings, thick texture that reads as mud on a phone screen. stuff that makes no sense for the feed. feels good to make things that aren't trying to perform for a thumbnail lol