The Death of the Follower
(or) Will we ever reach people online again?
There’s an interesting conversation bubbling up on platforms about the ways social media companies (YouTube, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, TikTok, etc.) have abandoned showing your posts to your followers in favor of algorithmic reach.
Everything is being designed and incentivized for a post-follow, For You Page discovery feed. The leadership of those companies and the cottage industry of social media experts are pushing for everyone to accept this new reality, and make content to gather likes and views, not followers. And people are kinda pissed about it.
Whether this is a good or bad thing, our fundamental understanding of how social media works needs to shift — social media, at least as the kind we’ve known for the last ~20 years, is dead. Or less hyperbolically, it has become something else entirely.
Make your sacrifices to the AlgoGods
Instagram moved away from a purely chronological feed in 2016, so this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. But we’ve been dealing with the fallout and ensuing strategic product decisions ever since, trying to find our bearings.
Trying to figure out what The Algorithm wants is such a waste of time and energy. It’s like appeasing temperamental Greek gods: Oh my crops failed and my daughter died so that means Athena is angry — maybe??! I’m going to butcher 5 goats and send away my youngest son to get back in her good graces.
Just let us see posts from people we follow instead of telling us we’re praying to the wrong god.
What most of these incumbent social media companies respond when vocal users say they want a return to the way things were is essentially “no, you don’t” and they say they have the data to prove it. In 2020, Facebook and Instagram did an experiment with a large sample size of US adults, who were shown a chronological feed for three months, with no option to opt back in to the algorithm. The results, Meta said, empirically proved that people didn’t actually want a chronological feed. Why? Because people left the app sooner when they were shown a chronological feed versus an algorithm-dominated one. From Meta’s perspective, the old way of doing things means people are using their products less, therefor it’s inherently bad. Or at least less good.
So what about a relationship with social media where I open the app, see the things the people I follow have posted, and simply leave? Could that be considered a good thing? Not from their perspective. More engagement is good, less engagement is bad. Seems like a quantity, not quality situation.
Contrastingly, most of the comms from the leaders of these companies talk about quality, not quantity. Or at least attention being a measure of quality, and therefor the most desirable signal. Instagram head Adam Mosseri is replying to a lot of people on Threads, but this reply stood out in particular (emphasis mine):
Follower counts matter less than view and like counts. I understand why people focus so much on follower counts; they’re prominent and they’re easy to find. But if you actually want to get a sense for how relevant an account is, look at how many likes they get per post and how many views per reel instead.
These tech companies have access to real data that we can’t see, at scale(s) we can’t imagine, but doesn’t common sense dictate that people focus on follower counts because we associate a follower with someone who has opted in to see what we’re posting? That’s how things were for the first decade of social media, so it seems like a reasonable take. Even when a post escapes engagement purgatory and goes wide to a new — albeit temporary — audience (“Good for you! Look what we’ve done for you!” they say), only a fraction of our followers are in the mix, and those likes and views aren’t translating into followers or converting in any meaningful way. This is the new normal, and plenty of folks don’t want to accept it.
Personally, I wish companies like Meta would say “we think it’s better for our business model to do what we’re doing, and we believe what we’re doing is more interesting for you within that ecosystem” and be honest about it. Their business model (ads) creates their incentives (longer engagement to sell more ads), and that shapes their product. Meta’s mission statement is “to give people the power to build community1 and bring the world closer together,” but every feature and strategy flows from their business model. And their business model wants reach, not followers.
The great abandoning
I’ve jokingly lamented that social media in 2024 is a Venn diagram of “Ow My Balls” from Idiocracy and the “I’d buy that for a dollar!” guy from Robocop. I’d probably add the morbidly lazy screen-time society from WALL•E to the mix. So if we don’t want all that, where do we go from here?
Much like the dying malls of suburban America, increasing numbers of people are simply walking away from social media. My wife and many of my friends, far less terminally online than me, are peacefully living their best lives IRL. It’s certainly an option — for them.
But I’m also seeing folks who have spent years building audiences of 25,000–100,000 followers for their businesses say it’s not worth it anymore. Too much effort for not enough return. Every time you think you’ve figured out how to game the system, the system changes because the algorithm is fickle — “like appeasing temperamental Greek gods.” When you’ve amassed a following the size of a mid-market city, but you never see each other anymore, why bother?
We had it pretty good for awhile there. The legacy social media companies gave us distribution in trade for our content, and we all lived happily ever after. But now they’ve taken it away. So how do we get back to something like that? Or get through it to something good and new?
Deeper, not wider
I was having lunch yesterday with one of my blissfully offline friends — “if you see something cool, you gotta email it to me” — talking about the open mic poetry night I hosted this week, the awkward beauty of in-person events, and the joy of discovering new people where you live, alongside the context of community you already know.
Zach Klein said “Our generation has created a lot of virtual ways to participate in communities, but none of it compares to the fulfillment of being in a real place that causes us to feel belonging and connected to other people.” I’m curious about the ways we can use the technology of the web to accelerate community — not just the plural of ‘user’ and but actual meaningful community.
In-person activities and gatherings are wonderful, and personally we’re doubling down on them here. But they’re not always practical; they’re limited by pesky things like time and geography and how it’s hard to leave your house without spending $100. Surely there’s some solution in between yelling into the void casting pearls before algorithmic swine and the retired dude breakfast posse at the local Hardee’s? Something that’s not contorting our online personas in the image of the algorithm to reach ~10% more strangers who probably don’t care, and won’t stick around.
Patreon’s CEO/co-founder Jack Conte2 had a recent keynote at SXSW (well worth the 45min runtime). It’s a fascinating take on how we got where we are, and what might be next. He says “I want to help build the type of internet that I want as a creator” while unpacking the ways the incumbent social media companies won’t/can’t change “because their revenue relies on maximizing attention.” Conte draws a distinction between some newer social companies aiming for deeper connections with true fans, not just more connections with bored eyeballs. Sounds like a great start.
As for me and my house
I want the things I make and write and draw to facilitate connections with real people in real places who actually seem to give a damn if I make or write or draw. And I’m on the lookout for any technology that might help me do that. But I’m done expecting from incumbent social media giants what they’re now strategically incapable of providing — connection with people who signal they want to be connected with me.
For that we’ll all need to build something new/old.
Another Zach Klein gem I love: “I think the real trouble is the conflation of platforms and communities. To this day, despite their good intentions, when a platform refers to its community, they’re usually referring to the plural of ‘user’.”
I like to think I kinda know a bunch of things and way too much lore about the web, but y’all — the Scary Pockets guy is the CEO/cofounder of Patreon?! How did I miss that?