I wish follower counts still mattered

It's becoming harder than ever to build a following online. Not because there are too many content creators and social media users or because you're doing something wrong. It's because social media has changed, probably permanently.

Specifically, who you follow and how many followers you have is no longer the most important measure of success for content creators. We're seeing this become a reality in real time as Instagram makes Views a primary focus of creator analytics instead of likes or followers.

It's because of the way content appears on your social media feeds. Now, instead of seeing mostly or only content from accounts you follow, an algorithm -- in the case of Meta, AI -- decides what to show you based on what it thinks you might be interested in. This has started to discourage social media users from following accounts -- and I hate that.

Maybe I'm old school (I created a Facebook account in 2007; I had a MySpace). But this hard shift away from using follower counts and likes as a measure of success, especially as a content creator, has been a difficult change to adapt to. Or maybe my social media "age" isn't the problem. Maybe it has more to do with the content I am interested in making online.

I've spent my entire social media life creating content for specific audiences (e.g., people who follow me for very specific types of content). I'm having a hard time getting used to creating content to please a machine. It's no longer about making content for a community of followers who enjoy what I make. This whole thing has become a game, a race to see who can make the most content that the algorithm will decide needs to be seen by the most people.

It's no longer about making good content for your audience. It's about making potentially viral content for the entire world. That feels overwhelming to me. It feels like an impossible task. I feel the pressure to please everyone more now than ever before, and I don't know what to do about that.

Maybe what I'm mourning is the deprivation of the dopamine rush that comes with gaining a new follower. You can achieve a similar feeling when you look at how many people have seen your post or video, but for me, there's just something about seeing that follower count go up. That's a sense of accomplishment that can't be replicated, as dystopian as that sounds.

But I know what you're going to say. Get over it. Adapt. Times are changing.

And you're not wrong. But I can still look back on how things used to be as I move forward, and wish certain things had not changed so drastically.