When The Algorithm Doesn’t Love You Anymore

Here’s a dirty secret I rarely say out loud as a writer: I don’t want you to friend me on Facebook.

I don’t want you to follow me on Threads or Twitter or Instagram. I sure as fuck don’t give a shit if you’re following me on TikTok. 

I’m on all these places, and I’ll engage with you if they’re the only choice, but they’re not my primary focus.

As a writer, I’ve got three top tiers of engagement: I want you to subscribe to my newsletter. If that’s a no-go, the second-best choice is joining my Patreon. The third choice—just—is following my YouTube. Maybe, as a last resort, I’d taken a follow on BlueSky.

Why? Because everything listed in that first paragraph are increasingly algorithmically driven. A follow there is next to worthless to me, because the For You page or “content we think you’d like” has taken over the follower feed.

I’m interested in actual followers, who’ll hear from me regularly. Email is still an old-school follow. Patreon, for various reasons, is much the same. YouTube is algorithmic as hell these days, but at least has the Subscriptions section where you can get updates from folks directly.

And for a writer—heck, for any artist—an old-school follow is the most valuable thing there is.

I miss the old-school follow. I’d still be talking about Facebook et al. with affection if they still offered something like it.

But they don’t, even if so many writers still produce content for social media like it’s 2007.

THE MAGIC OF THE FOLLOW

The founder of Patreon, Jack Conte, spent much of 2024 giving speeches about the Death of the Follow and how it will affect creators who rely on the internet.

If you’re unfamiliar with his work, Conte is an interesting case study. Before he was the CEO of a tech platform, he was a musician who broke out on YouTube as both a solo artist and one half of Pomplamoose. If you were online in 2010, you probably encountered some of their covers (I’m still a big fan of their version of All The Single Ladies).

Conte is still a working musician on top of running Patreon, and he created Patreon to solve a problem he saw with the way YouTube was changing as the platform matured.

There’s two things writers and other creative artists typically want from social media:

We want to reach people who don’t know about us and tell them about our work.We want to build our following and keep talking to the people who like our work.

Buttons that allowed users to follow or subscribe to us on social media, Conte argues, were the revolutionary part of Web 2.0. It allowed people who liked what we did to sign up and hear from us repeatedly. It gave writers, musicians, and other artists a distribution channel that ensured future work was sent to people most likely to be receptive to it.

“The follow is not some handy feature of a social network,” Conte says. “It’s foundational architecture for human creativity and organisation… Not just reach, but a step past it. Ongoing communication, connection, a sustained relationship. Community.” (Jack Conte, Death of the Follower: SXSW 2024 Keynote)

The Follow allowed small creators to reach a dedicated group of fans and build up their profile. It allowed books to succeed that wouldn’t otherwise.

I ran pretty hot on my author platform in that era and saw its effects first-hand: small press books that sold out print runs unexpectedly; ideas that went viral because they were shared and re-shared by people who enjoyed the way I thought and wrote.

But large chunks of the internet don’t work like that anymore.

I wish it did.

Because here’s the thing: The follow is magic for creators.

It’s not so good for social media platforms.

THE ERA OF RANKING AND ALGORITHMIC FEEDS

There’s a simplicity to the old-school follow: a user says, “I’d like to see more from this user,” and then they see more. Every post is displayed on the feed as it goes live, and they can track what their favourite creators (and their friends, and their loved ones, and their favourite burger place) are doing day to day.

Here’s the problem: most people aren’t that interesting twenty-four hours of the day. Or they’re not showing up and talking about the things you love all the time.

And social media needs to be interesting. It needs to reward you with stuff you absolutely want to engage with every time you log on, because the money in social media lies in having a large user base who shows up often, giving you data and reach that can be sold to advertisers.

Facebook started messing with the feed around 2009 to 2012, moving away from a solid timeline and towards an algorithmic feed. They’d survey all the posts made by folks you followed, and feed you the ones that were getting the most engagement and interest from other people. Stuff nobody engaged with was more likely to get hidden.

Instantly, a follow became less useful. Largely because, in those nascent days of the internet, stuff that got engagement was often realising a chunk of your friends group were not who you thought (2013 was the peak era of friends engaging in comment-fights with the vague acquaintances whose racism and sexism was exposed).

Over time, Facebook got good at showing you folks you weren’t following, who were still interesting. Then it got good at showing you paid ads that held your attention and kept you on the platform. Soon you could idle away whole days engaging with vaguely interesting stuff that tapped into a part of your identity and fed it.

That shit was insidious, but effective. Great for Facebook. Less great for us. 

A few years after that, we had TikTok, which disposed of the follower feed altogether. The default there became pure algorithm—the For You page—where a constant stream of stuff you’re probably interested in rolls past in a series of six seconds videos.

And because algorithmic feeds worked, everyone adopted them. Facebook’s innovation begat similar tools on Twitter and Instagram and Threads. Suddenly, you had to pay to reach your followers, or feed a steady stream of high-engagement content into your social media.

And here’s the thing about the algorithm: it favours a small percentage of creators who reliably get traction with posts. It randomly gives attention on another subset of creators, based upon the needs of the algorithm. As Cory Doctrow notes in his essay on the Enshittification of TikTok, the platform will often artificially inflate the presence of a new users’ videos on the For You page to convince them of the platform’s value. 

Then, shit goes wrong.

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: TikTok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. TikTok is performing a delicate dance here: There’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and TikTok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time TikTok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing. (The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, Cory Doctrow)

From there, you enter a cycle. Random bursts of attention to make it feel like the algorithm is favouring you, followed by long stretches where your reach is throttled to entice users into coughing up cash.

WHAT’S THE ACTUAL BENEFIT HERE?

Here’s my problem with the current state of social media: writers and other artists still treat it like an old-school follower platform. I’m certainly guilty of it, spending days creating month-long posting schedules to maximize the reach of my content and try to prompt engagement.

And, as ever, the problem isn’t that social media has no benefit. The fluctuating algorithmic reach is still potentially useful and can feed readers towards work. It allows you to cultivate fans over time, especially the small subset of followers who actively show up and engage with everything you post.

I’m not saying get the hell off social media, just because it’s algorithmic.

I simply started thinking about the return on investment with regard to that time, and how I could maximize it.

I want to loop back to the two goals writers typically have with social media use, mentioned at the start of this entry:

We want to reach people who aren’t familiar with our work.We want to build our following and talk to people who like our work.

Algorithmic social media is terrible at building a following and connecting you with your followers, but it has an upside: a For You page or algorithmic feed is very good at putting your content in front of people who might be interested in your work.

That has a benefit to us as writers, especially in the early days of a platform before the enshittification has really set in. TikTok in 2020 was an incredible lead generation tool, just as Facebook was in its earlier days.

My concern isn’t that it can’t do these things, but that it can’t do these things as effectively as other options.

As noted back when I looked at the capital exchanges inherent in social media, it makes more sense to run adds or use lead-generation tools like newsletter swaps that feed potential readers into a tool where they can still follow me (like a newsletter) than it does to spend six to eight hours generating posts to do the same job organically.

YOUR NEW MINDSET: DE-PLATFORM LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER

I spend a lot of time listening to other authors talk about how they use social media, and as someone who mentors other writers a lot, I spend a lot of time doing courses about how to maximize engagement on platforms and use it to drive readership.

I think it’s important to understand these platforms and use them; I just think we need to engage with a different goal. To borrow a phrase from social media guru Justin Welsh:

Social media is one of the best to master because you can gain attention and then slowly de-platform prospects and customers to something you own – like an email list. (Why People Fail On Social Media, JustinWelsh.me)

If I’m showing up on a social media platform in a professional capacity as a writer or publisher, this is pretty much my goal. I want to get people to leave Facebook or Threads or Instagram, and go to a platform where the Old School Follow is still in effect.

A place where I can clear away the noise of a thousand other posts and the clatter of algorithmic distractions, and talk to readers who actively say, “yes, talk to me more about this thing we’re both interested in.”

Email lists are old-school tech, and so clunky that lots of people devalue them or outsource their creation to “free” services like Substack, but the truth is they’re the most effective follow-based tools writers have these days (and, in terms of data they can generate, even more effective when you learn to use them well).

Every writer finds their own way of doing this. Some use ads to drive people to free reader magnets—and I certainly do a lot of that. I’m also putting a lot more writing up on blogs, creating hubs where I can capture followers (newsletters, Patreon) and use engagement on social media as tendrils that reach out and snare potential readers like kraken plucking sailors off the deck of a ship.

It’s slow and steady work, but ultimately less disheartening than fighting the algorithm for each new release. 100 followers who engage with you regularly often prove to be far more valuable than a thousand follows on a social media site where you need likes and reposts to find other people.

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