I'm still standing

The Facebook algorithm has done a proper job on Another Angry Voice, but I'm still going.

Back before 2018, Another Angry Voice was one of the most viral UK political pages on Facebook. In fact, of the top ten most Facebook viral political articles during the 2017 "Corbyn Surge" general election, I wrote three of them (first, second, and seventh). Pre-2017 Another Angry Voice had more Facebook followers than almost all UK politicians and political parties, and far higher levels of engagement too.

In 2018 Facebook changed the algorithm to make independent political pages like Another Angry Voice much less visible, and much less viral, and they’ve been gradually tuning down my visibility ever since.

These days virtually all of the 373,000 people who follow Another Angry Voice on Facebook never see any of my posts, from one month to the next.

One of the big changes Facebook made was to dramatically reduce the power of the share button. In the good old days, a share meant that a large proportion of the friends of whoever shared it would see that shared content in their feed. These days shares are way less powerful, which doesn’t mean stop bothering to share stuff on Facebook, just be aware that it’s nowhere near as effective as it used to be.

Another big change was the decision to turn Facebook into more of a "walled garden" by dramatically deprioritising posts that include links to places outside of Facebook, such as the Another Angry Voice blog. This resulted in my blog post views dropping from 50,000 to 100,000 on average, with the occasional article reaching a million+ hits, through articles that scraped past just 10,000 hits being the best performers; to almost all of my articles struggling to get past a couple of thousand views.

As you can imagine, it was deeply dispiriting to lose 90%+ of my traffic like this, and to go from a million+ hits per month, to well below 100,000.

Critics might try to argue that this decline was caused by a collapse in the quality of my content, but I don’t think my writing has deteriorated that dramatically, and it wouldn’t explain why so many other independent media pages have also suffered similarly dramatic collapses in their Facebook visibility, virality, and traffic to their websites, would it?

In recent times Facebook have introduced a new policy of flooding people’s Facebook feeds with content from pages they don’t follow, and have never even expressed the slightest interest in (it’s like the horrible "For You" Twitter feed that’s so full of diabolical extreme-right content, but without the option of switching back to the "Following" feed).

This all adds up to a situation where the majority of people who intentionally followed Another Angry Voice on Facebook never see any of my content, while about a third of their feed is comprised of posts from accounts they never even asked to see.

I regularly receive surprised messages from people who have seen my content randomly pop up in their Facebook feed again after months, or even years. Many of whom thought I’d simply given up writing because the Facebook algorithm had deprioritised my content so dramatically from their feed that they’d stopped seeing anything at all.

Sadly this kind of content repression is what happens when we allow capitalists to utterly dominate the means of communication. I mean why would they allow independent left-wing pages to keep going mega-viral, when they can just tinker with the algorithm to dramatically reduce their reach, while promoting content that’s more convenient for capitalist interests (right-wing and extreme-right stuff), and more financially beneficial to Facebook (content from pages that pay for reach rather than going viral because people really like the content itself).

Part of my problem was my own complacency. I never bothered to establish an AAV email mailing list back in the boom times, because I hadn’t imagined that my rapid page growth could just be turned off, and my Facebook reach tuned down by over 90% through algorithm changes.

A couple of years ago I moved my blog over to Substack because it offered something new. It doesn’t just function as a blog-hosting platform, it’s also an email mailing list; a social media platform; and a subscription service, all rolled into one.

Over the last couple of years Substack Notes has been getting better and better. It’s kind of like Twitter used to be, before Elon Musk ruined it. If you haven’t downloaded the Substack app and followed a selection of the best and most insightful writers on here, I’d strongly recommend it.

Since switching over to Substack I’ve seen a significant resurgence in traffic to my articles. I’ve not recovered to millions of hits per month, every month, and I’m not sure that I ever will. But hundreds of thousands per month is still really good, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who shares my stuff (on whichever platform), and especially grateful to those who subscribe here, and those who still send subscriptions through my older subscription services (GoCardless, PayPal, Ko-Fi).

I literally couldn’t continue dedicating so much time to writing and creating infographics without the support of all the wonderful people who choose to pay for what they know they could receive for free because of my commitment to the Pay As You Feel principle, and my refusal to paywall any of my political and economic content.

Thanks ever so much to everyone who supports my work, and I hope I can continue repaying this support with content that you find trustworthy, informative, and engaging.

Tom (Another Angry Voice)