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Coffee
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Everything Else
You may have figured this out, but we’re not exactly enthusiastic users of social media here at FCR. It takes up a lot of time, and these days it feels like we are becoming slaves to the algorithm more than ever.
I’m going to keep the ranting to a minimum here but for those of you interested in finding out more about how we’re currently viewing social media platforms, I’d suggest that the excellent work of Cory Doctorow is a good place to start. Here is a taste:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”
Read the full article in Wired magazine here
I recently asked our newsletter subscribers for their thoughts on all this. It was both reassuring and surprising to hear that those who responded were ambivalent at best. Not a single person got in touch to tell us that we should spend more time and effort focusing on social media. Interesting, right?
What do we do about all this then?
Moving forward, there are three places where we’ll be putting our energy in future (spoiler alert: Instagram isn’t one of them). This is how we’ll keep in touch and engage with our community.
Firstly, we’re going to experiment with day to day updates on the home page of our website (look for FCR Happenings near the bottom of the homepage). This is for the causal browsers amongst you who are curious about what we’re up to but don’t want to sign up for anything. It will be much like how we used to use Instagram- but without the algorithm, noise and toxicity.
If you want to connect more actively with us and other coffee nerds, then you should head to our Discord server. We’re going to put more effort into nurturing a community-focussed space where people are comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas around coffee. We’ll also share the day to day updates there.
If you prefer getting the occasional email delivered to your inbox, and you don’t want to miss out on our subscriber-exclusive ‘Special Releases’ series, then signing up for our email newsletter will be the best option for you.
We’re going to continue to use Instagram (for now), but we’re keeping that under review and things may well change. Either way, Instagram won't be something we spend much time on in the future.
We’re hoping that there’s something for everyone and that we can spend less time trying to keep up with how the platforms work, and more time doing what we love best, sourcing and roasting amazing coffee!
It’ll be interesting to see how this all pans out. As always, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts if you have something you’d like to share.
