It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now

There are many ways to succeed on social media, but they are not all the same. Perhaps the account belongs to a popular brand or famous person whose online following is predetermined and effortless. Perhaps someone's internet fame is homegrown and hard-won, the result of competing for followers on a particular social network, as Emily Mariko found success on TikTok in 2021, building an audience that has now reached twelve million thanks to silent videos of cooking salmon rice dishes and the like. Perhaps an account has gained digital fame as a source of credible expertise in a particular field, such as the account of economic historian Adam Tooze, who has over two hundred thousand followers on X – a lot, but not too much big. However, in many cases, a huge audience today means little in terms of human enthusiasm – most followers may be botshater followers and dead profiles, as evidenced by the low engagement of the user’s real posts. Moreover, now that social media has dominated culture for over a decade, many major accounts belong to figures from an earlier era of fame; they are more establishment than avant-garde. Music producer Jack Antonoff, who reached his creative peak in his twenties, has more than half a million subscribers on X, and the famous up-and-coming musician Fueled by time numbers just over three thousand. What's the best way to follow? Big numbers don't quite mean what was once thought to be a signal of importance or influence, as social media has become more outdated, more manipulated and more automated by artificial intelligence.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to trust large numbers of followers, the opposite has gained some notoriety—visibly modest followers. In recent version from her fashion newsletter, Feed mewriter Emily Sundberg praised the publication's new editor-in-chief AirmailJulia Vitale, for No As a savvy social media user, “I respect her number of followers on her personal Instagram of less than 500,” Sundberg wrote. IN problem fashion newsletter Blackbird spy plane Under the headline “Now This Is How You Post,” writer Jonah Weiner also praised stylist Lotta Volkova for haphazardly posting on Instagram and for not being afraid that her images (a banal river landscape or a row of cabinets) would only get a few hundred likes or a dozen comments each. At one time, this might have seemed disgraceful for an account with nearly half a million followers. Volkova’s position, Weiner summarizes, is: “Who cares?” There is a certain status that comes from ignoring the usual signs of success online, as well as envy caused by those who can make a career without the pressure of social media. Sundberg told me, “In a time when people are constantly posting everything about their lives on the Internet to get attention, you almost get a little disappointed that someone can be successful without doing that.” On the contrary, your own overexposure becomes shameful. Weiner, who has a personal Instagram account with about three hundred followers, told me, “If you feel that not only your ego but your livelihood depends on these platforms, then you may also be projecting an enviable financial stability, as well as an enviable emotional stability, onto someone who doesn't use them at all.”

When did a large number of followers lose their natural appeal? This is a post-pandemic phenomenon. In the midst COVID-19Online followings have surged as people across the planet, in lockdown, spend more time looking at screens. TikTok, which recently became popular in the United States, had an enhanced algorithmic feed that allowed it to gain millions of followers literally overnight. Instagram replicated this strategy with Reels, inspiring hordes of new successful content creators. But over time, the audience's attention waned. As users have become more reliant on algorithmic recommendations, they've become accustomed to going where their feed takes them rather than intentionally searching for specific accounts. This means that it is easier to optimize content to use the algorithm. Grace Clark, community lead for a large e-commerce technology company, told me, “Audience building is no longer really something 'expensive', meaning difficult or rare. It's easy to play around with.” At the same time, users are drawn to more personalized digital publishing platforms, from YouTube to Patreon, where small and dedicated audiences can gather around the creators of their choice. According to the analysis carried out for Financial TimesTotal time spent on traditional social media peaked in 2022 and has been declining since then. Meanwhile, the largest platforms are filled with mostly passive consumers who don't care about unfollowing people they're no longer interested in. When was the last time you deleted your Facebook friends or rated your list of followers by X?

The appeal of online anti-fame reminds me of a rule that a friend who manages social accounts for a multinational company adheres to: professional social media managers should have messy, unoptimized personal accounts. “It’s kind of flexible to have bad photos and unpolished content,” she said. You could create great content—after all, it's your job to know how to do it—but that doesn't mean you have to do it outside of work hours. In fact, if you don't fuss too much, it can paradoxically make you appear more professional and trustworthy since you're not busy improving your own profile. The professionalization of social media is itself a major reason why amassing large numbers of followers can now seem like a sign of bad taste. If in the early twenties social networks were more of a hobby or personal hobby, today the relationship between subscriber and subscriber has become rampantly commercialized. Personal social media accounts now serve as advertising platforms for podcasts, subscription newsletters, Depop pages, cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, and shopping referral links. Saarim Zaman, founder of a startup that uses technology to organize offline meetings, told me, “It feels like everything has suddenly become transactional.” As an example, he cited a trend of X users reacting to breaking news by sharing screenshots of their bets on Polymarket, a site that allows betting on world events. These posters are essentially “talking their books,” in financial parlance, in the way an investor might promote a startup in which he has a stake, trying to convince others to take part in his bet and thereby increase his potential payout. Cultivating an audience has become increasingly inseparable from attempts to make a profit.