We’re dangerously close to having only influencers left on the social media platforms.

It means they don’t have anyone to actually influence anymore. An influencer is followed by thousands of smaller influencers, who in turn are followed by hundreds of thousands of micro-influencers.

I know, it’s crazy!

The goal of influencing is generally pushing a narrative, opinion, or product onto a large group of people.

But the goal of being an influencer is also to not get influenced by others.

That means that most of your followers don’t care about what you say anymore. Their goal in following you — given you have a larger reach than them — is solely in catching a little of your reach for themselves.

They comment on your videos or X threads with the motive of getting some people to click on their profile. Follow them.

The darkest place in the Polish internet

I created a startup in 2006 that was dubbed the black hole of the internet in Poland by some journalist. However, it seems that it was a prediction of what actually transpired almost 20 years later.

The premise was easy — you create a “wall” and other people can post short, sticky notes onto that wall. It’s like Twitter and we made it a few months before Twitter. The sticky notes could only hold a certain amount of characters too.

And it went viral.

At the peak, we had 100,000 daily active users on the site from Poland alone. We never made an English version of it, so I have no idea what would’ve happened then.

The problem?

We unintentionally created a popularity contest among the users. The cards weren’t a conversation — they were one-way. Someone can leave a new card on your wall, and the only way to respond is to go to their wall and stick another card with what you want to say.

Can you guess what the most popular comment type was?

Hi! I don’t know you but I bet you’re awesome! Come to my wall and write me something nice, please!

Yes. That is the 2006–2007 equivalent of begging for engagement. There were up to 200,000 comments with that general message added to people’s walls every single day. It was over 70% of all the comments.

It’s the same now

Social media has become all about engagement farming and trying to “hack the algo”. Clickbait and gaming attention are more important than merit.

The average attention span of humans in 2024 is likely lower than that of a goldfish. Less than 8 seconds.

Everyone wants your attention.

All the influencers, smaller influencers, and micro-influencers have a single goal.

Slide into the DM’s

That’s why influencers at a similar level often “slide into the DM’s” of other influencers and try to befriend them. Of course, some of that can be sincere. Most of it however is based on the rule of reciprocity.

Meaning if I’m nice to you in the DM’s, there’s a bigger chance you’ll like or repost my content. We humans are built that way.

It is part forming of human connections and part gaming the algo. The parts aren’t equal though. The main goal of everyone on social media is to have more followers than you.

More reach.

A career that’s ending

Everyone wants to be an influencer now. 30% of American kids want to be YouTubers, according to a 2019 Hariss Poll survey as reported by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, 60% of Chinese kids want to be an Astronaut, with less than 20% going for social media fame.

I’m building a personal brand, bro!

In an increasingly noisy world, those who scream the loudest get a little ahead.

Everyone is now frantically focusing on a personal brand because social media companies decided that it’s the only way for us to stay relevant.

Just being good at what you do is not enough. You need to be a brand and be well-known. This race for the numbers is currently ahead of the race for quality. It’s also the reason we see posts like this:

The system is broken

We’re in a hamster wheel of fighting for attention in hopes that one day someone like Elon Musk will retweet our meme and we gain 10,000 followers because of that.

We’re past having something to say. Unless it’s online trolling for the sake of causing the most controversy.

And if someone wants to cover their bases they’ll start the post with “Unpopular opinion:” — even when most people think the same way.

Everyone is desperately “gaming the algo” just to slightly enlarge their own piece of the pie. What they fail to notice is how meaningless those numbers really are.

Years ago, I noticed many “popular” Instagram accounts in my niche went with the assumption that your first 100K followers need to be bought. We then ended up with 250K follower accounts that get 90 likes under a post.

Who are they really fooling?

People don’t care

Many of your followers are (usually) not your friends. They simply want to use you as a ladder or a trampoline to their own success. It means they don’t follow you because of what you say or represent.

It’s purely a selfish motive.

When a post you make succeeds, they’ll try to imitate you next time. If it “fails” the engagement test, they take a mental note.

What they fail to see is that their follower groups are exactly the same. They also don’t care about their posts and simply want to reach the next threshold.

1000 followers? 10,000? 100K?

Longform to the rescue?

The modern influencer is heavily focused on the short form. Quick, 15-second vertical videos with colorful, jumping subtitles. Crazy background transitions every 2–3 seconds to keep attention.

That editing style came to prominence with Mr. Beast and it’s a template for farming engagement in all of social media — not just on YouTube. The problem is, that every new level of influencer puts less time, effort, energy, and merit into what they do. They just copy Mr. Donaldson’s editing tactics.

Most of the online crowd is in that ultrafast loop of battling for engagement in some way.

But there is hope.

As with every trend, there is a group of people that gets bored with it quickly. Some truly want to get value from what they do online. Some do it to pretend they’re better than those 4-second attention span people. Whatever the motive, long-form with an actual message is slowly coming back.

Your personal brand shouldn’t be about gaming the algo. It should be about showing the quality of what you do. And that works…

Sometimes.

This really has to change otherwise we’ll just be forever in that crazy loop. It is fixing itself though — slowly.

We’re not there yet, but from my personal experience, a single follower that can read this 1000-word article in full is way better than 1000 followers that came from a superfast 15-second video.

I recently received this comment under my long post with our AI tool video attached. I believe this sums it all up.

This is not engagement farming: I am truly curious what do you think about it. Have you noticed this shift in which everyone’s interested in engagement instead of sharing ideas? Am I exaggerating? Is this article just an engagement farm of a different kind?

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