Social media, trail cameras, trophy expectations, and endless optimization have made us better deer hunters. But are they making deer hunting better?

Published by Eric Clark on Wednesday, August 12th 2026

We’ve never had more tools, information, and technology to help us become better deer hunters. But somewhere along the way, have we gotten worse at simply enjoying it?

There are probably more ways to become a better deer hunter today than at any other point in history. We have mapping apps that allow us to study a property before ever setting foot on it. Cell cameras tell us when a deer walks past a tree while we’re sitting at work. We can check wind, weather, thermals, hunting pressure and historical imagery all from our phones. There’s also basically damn near an endless amount of information available to us through podcasts, YouTube, social media, online courses, e-scouting seminars and every other corner of hunting media. It's actually become more challenging to choose where and how you get which information you're after.

I realize there’s some irony in "complaining" about the abundance of hunting information while hosting a hunting podcast and writing a hunting article. We are very much baked into this ecosystem of information overload here.

The thing is though, all of this should make hunting better. We know more, have access to better equipment, and can make more informed decisions than hunters from previous generations could have possibly imagined. It’s easier to find places to hunt, understand those places and shorten the learning curve once we get there.

Lately, though, I’ve wondered if there’s a tradeoff buried somewhere in all of that progress.

On a recent Okayest Hunter Podcast episode, we asked a question that we haven't seen directly addressed yet: Have we gotten so good at hunting that we’ve gotten worse at enjoying it?

I didn’t really know the answer, which is why we opened the phone lines. What followed was probably more useful than anything we could have come up with sitting around the studio ourselves, which is why I love it when our listeners call into the show. There's so much value in hearing from the hunting community directly.

Has Whitetail Hunting Taken Over Hunting Season?

Our first caller, Dave, immediately took the conversation somewhere I hadn’t considered. Maybe the problem isn’t that we take hunting too seriously. Maybe we take deer hunting too seriously.

“I feel like we’re too focused on whitetail hunting, and it’s taking away from enjoying other types of hunting, like small game hunting,” Dave said. He’s seen people lose access for small-game hunting because landowners didn’t want them disturbing the property during deer season. He’s a trapper, too, and sees a similar contradiction there. Everyone wants raccoons and coyotes removed, but they don’t necessarily want someone walking around trapping them during the fall because they’re worried about screwing up their deer hunting.

Meanwhile, a squirrel hunt with one of my kids can start feeling like I’m giving up a valuable deer-hunting day. When you actually say that out loud, it sounds kind of ridiculous, or at least I think it does... like WTF?

Derek (my co-host and good friend) and I could immediately relate to what Dave was describing. Derek said he can’t remember the last time he gave much of his fall to grouse or small-game hunting because, well, he's deer hunting. October arrives and every available day becomes another opportunity to sit in a tree. Even when the deer hunting isn’t particularly good, apparently I need to keep doing the thing that currently isn’t fun because I might miss the day when it becomes fun again, or something like that?

Maybe that’s one of the unintended consequences of getting better at this. Deer hunting can slowly become less of an activity and more of a season-long project we manage. Cameras need checked. Target bucks ought to be patterned. Access routes need protected. Wind directions need accounted for. Vacation days need strategically deployed... blah blah blah. Every decision has an opportunity cost because somewhere out there is a buck we might be screwing up.

How Social Media Changes Deer Hunting Expectations

Then another caller, Troy, called in and brought up something that probably affects more hunters than any of us, like admitting: social media. Shit.

Troy talked about getting into deer season and watching the successful hunts start showing up in his feed. One guy shoots a good buck, then another, then another. Before long, he catches himself thinking, “Everybody’s laying down nice bucks and I ain’t even seen one.” That’s when the second-guessing starts. Maybe he needs to move. Maybe he needs to change his approach. Maybe he’s doing something wrong.

Of course, everybody isn’t killing nice bucks. We’re seeing a concentrated stream of the people who happened to succeed while hearing almost nothing from the enormous number of hunters who didn’t. Well, maybe not nothing. We try to share as many of our failures as possible!

Wisconsin’s archery season can open, and by 8:00 in the morning somebody has already posted a giant. By noon, there are several more. You’re sitting there wondering how everyone has this figured out while you’ve spent the last three hours repeatedly being fooled by the same squirrel, or not hunting at all and sipping coffee while your kids are playing in the yard.

The thousands of other hunters staring at empty woods aren’t posting pictures of it.

I think the distortion is interesting because exceptional outcomes start looking normal when we see enough of them. Once they look normal, they can kind of become the "standard" against which we measure our own season, which is dumb.

Troy pointed to one of the stranger symptoms of this when he talked about hunters posting a deer and immediately qualifying it: “He’s not the biggest, but…”

We’ve all seen this year after year and season after season. Hell, plenty of us have probably done it. I know I have. Someone shoots a deer they were excited enough to draw a bow on, recover, photograph, and bring home, and then before sharing it with other hunters they feel compelled to explain why it was okay to shoot.

Troy’s advice was much simpler: “Be proud of that deer, man.” As he put it, whether it was a doe, little buck or big buck, there’s a story attached to the hunt and “you shot that buck because you wanted to.”

What's most interesting to me is that I don’t think hunters start out thinking this way. A kid shooting his first deer usually isn’t wondering whether it will play well on Instagram, or at least I f****** hope not. Somewhere along the way, we learn the hierarchy. A deer becomes a buck. A buck becomes a good buck. A good buck becomes a mature buck. Then it becomes a target buck of a certain age or score. The goalposts can keep moving until a perfectly successful hunt somehow requires an explanation.

None of this is an argument against chasing big deer. I love big bucks as much as the next guy or gal, and I want a few more on my walls. I’ve tried chasing bigger deer, passed deer because I wanted something different, and spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about individual whitetails. I’ll probably continue doing all of those things. Having standards can certainly make or keep hunting more challenging and more interesting.

The more important question is whether those standards are actually ours.

Trail Cameras, Target Bucks, and Losing the Surprise

Troy eventually came to a similar conclusion with trail cameras. He told us he quit using them several years ago because he had become too fixated on individual deer. “I got so caught up in, ‘I’m hunting this deer. I’m not shooting another deer. I’m hunting this deer.’” Sometimes he killed that buck, but more often he didn’t. Eventually he realized the cameras had taken away something he valued more than he expected: surprise.

Without them, a deer he’s never seen can suddenly walk into range and become the deer he wants to shoot. It could be a buck with a weird rack or simply a big doe. “You get that excitement ’cause you didn’t even know that deer was there,” he said.

I understand what he means, even though I’m not giving up my trail cameras anytime soon. I mostly just enjoy looking at the photos and think it's cool to see what's out there, more than I actually leverage them for strategy. Overall, though, I do use cameras, mapping apps, and pretty much every other piece of modern hunting technology available to me. We’re even hosting an e-scouting seminar, so pretending I’m about to throw away my phone and navigate public land with a compass would be a tough sell.

That said, I do miss some of the unknown.

Derek mentioned that he remembers walking new properties when he was younger and feeling like every rub, trail, or little pocket of cover might be the spot. There was possibility everywhere because he didn’t know enough to immediately rule half of it out. Technology can give us answers much faster now, and I think that’s generally a good thing. I’m just increasingly aware that sometimes the question itself was part of the fun.

Redefining What a Successful Deer Season Looks Like

Another caller, Luke, has found his own way of stripping some of the outside noise away. Luke spent years hunting heavily pressured public land and was deeply involved in hunting media himself as a podcaster. These days, he told us he barely posts his hunting success online at all. “I don’t feel a need anymore,” he said. “My trophies are mine.”

His definition of a successful season is similarly uncomplicated: a full freezer. He still likes chasing big bucks and solving the puzzle of mature deer, but when the freezer isn’t full and the season is getting late, he’s willing to change the objective.

Why Deer Camp Still Matters More Than the Score

Then Ben Harrison from Bowhunting League called, and his perspective made the conversation even more interesting. Bowhunting League had 11 bucks over 200 inches entered last season. If anybody was going to make the case that deer hunting is about giant antlers, we had found a pretty qualified candidate.

Except when Ben talked about what made his previous season meaningful, he mostly talked about deer camp.

He had five major camps during the season, including one with more than 20 people. Obviously they were there to hunt, but the hunting was only part of what he remembered. They cooked, exchanged stories, met new people, traded hunts and crashed on couches. Someone would come back with a hog or a doe and, as Ben put it, “it’s the greatest thing ever.”

There’s something worth paying attention to when a guy surrounded by legitimate 200-inch whitetails starts describing the success of his season and mostly talks about the people he spent it with.

Derek noticed the same change in himself. He used to take solo hunting trips where he’d sleep in his minivan and hunt all day, every day because killing a deer was the objective and everything else was secondary. There’s still a part of him that likes that kind of stupid, self-inflicted challenge, and he doesn't think that’ll ever completely disappear.

But the older we get, the more I think we value coming back to a camp where other people are waiting. I think we all remember those evenings, meals, stories, and stupid things that happened with friends more clearly than we'd remember individual sits.

Maybe becoming a better hunter doesn’t always make those things more obvious. Sometimes it takes our attention away from them.

Modern Hunting Technology Isn’t the Problem

Importantly, not everyone who called agreed with the premise of the conversation. Our last caller told us he enjoys hunting considerably more today than he did when he was younger. He has better equipment, more freedom, more places to hunt, and property of his own. As a kid, his hunting was mostly limited to a few days of gun season on the same 20 acres. Today he has enough opportunity to hunt different ground throughout the season.

There is one thing he misses about the old days: “walking into the unknown.” He remembers hunting before trail cameras, when he really didn’t know what was out there. But given the choice between hunting as his 12-year-old self and hunting today, his answer was easy: “I would rather hunt as 35-year-old me.”

I'm glad he shared that perspective because it’s equally easy to over-romanticize the way hunting used to be. Some of the old gear sucked. Some of the treestands we used were basically leftover farm equipment someone welded together and added backpack straps to. Modern hunting equipment is lighter, warmer, and safer. Mapping technology has helped people discover places they otherwise might never have hunted. The amount of information available has allowed new hunters to learn things in a few seasons that might have taken previous generations years to figure out.

There’s nothing inherently virtuous about being cold, uncomfortable and lost.

What Actually Makes Deer Hunting Better?

So I don’t think the answer is that we need to go backward, get rid of our cameras or stop caring about becoming better hunters. I’m certainly not going to do that. What I took away from the conversation was something a little different.

Hunting has become surrounded by more voices telling us what matters. Score matters. Age matters. Gear matters. Tactics matter. The property matters. Killing a mature buck matters. Being successful consistently matters. None of those things are inherently wrong, and any one of them can make hunting more rewarding if it’s something you genuinely care about.

The trouble is figuring out whether the voice telling you to care is actually yours.

Maybe a successful season for you really is killing a 160-inch buck. Maybe it’s filling the freezer. Maybe you want to kill one with a trad bow. Maybe you want to hunt a new state, finally figure out a piece of public ground, take your kid squirrel hunting, or spend a week at deer camp with people you don’t get to see enough.

Maybe you eat your tag and still had a pretty damn good fall.

I’ve zigged and zagged through enough versions of this myself that I’m increasingly appreciative of hunters like my dad, who have seemingly managed to stay grounded through most of it. He doesn’t care much about brands, social media, or a lot of the other stuff we’ve layered onto hunting. He just hunts. I probably needed to go through all the other stuff before I could really appreciate the simplicity of that.

Maybe that’s where I’ve landed on the original question. Becoming a better hunter doesn’t always require adding another tactic, another piece of gear, or another source of information. Sometimes it might mean getting good enough at knowing yourself to recognize which things you can stop caring about.

And then just go hunting.