It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now

There are many ways to be big on social media, but they are not created equal. Maybe an account belongs to a popular brand or to a famous person, whose online following is preordained, no exertion required. Maybe one’s internet fame is homegrown and hard-won, the result of hustling for followers on a particular social network, the way Emily Mariko hit it big on TikTok, in 2021, building a viewership that has now reached twelve million with silent cooking videos of salmon rice bowls and the like. Maybe an account has attained digital renown as a source of trusted expertise in a given area, like that of the economic historian Adam Tooze, who has more than two hundred thousand followers on X—big but not too big. In many cases, though, a huge audience today could mean little in terms of human enthusiasm—the majority of followers might be bots, hate-followers, and dead profiles, as evidenced by low engagement on the user’s actual posts. Moreover, now that social media has dominated culture for more than a decade, many big accounts belong to figures of an earlier era of notoriety; they are the establishment rather than the vanguard. The music producer Jack Antonoff, who hit his creative peak in the twenty-tens, has more than a half million followers on X, whereas the acclaimed up-and-coming musician Nourished by Time has just over three thousand. Which is a better follow? The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence.

As it’s become harder to trust a high number of followers, the opposite—a conspicuously modest following—has attained a certain cachet. In a recent edition of her buzzy newsletter, Feed Me, the writer Emily Sundberg praised the new head editor of the publication Air Mail, Julia Vitale, for not being a social-media power user: “I respect her sub-500 follower count on her private Instagram,” Sundberg wrote. In an issue of the fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane headlined “Now That’s How You Post,” the writer Jonah Weiner similarly complimented the stylist Lotta Volkova for posting haphazardly on Instagram and being unafraid of her images (of a banal river landscape, or a row of storage lockers) getting only a few hundred likes or a dozen comments each. This might once have been considered embarrassing for an account with nearly a half million followers. Volkova’s attitude, Weiner summarizes, is “Who gives a f–k?” There’s a certain status that comes from ignoring the usual signs of success online, and an envy inspired by those who can grow a career without the pressure of performing on social media. Sundberg told me, “In a time when people are posting everything about their lives online constantly for attention, you almost get a little frustrated that someone can be successful without doing that.” One’s own overexposure comes to feel shameful by contrast. Weiner, who maintains a personal Instagram account with around three hundred followers, told me, “If you feel like not just your ego but your livelihood, too, depends on these platforms, then you might also project an enviable financial stability, along with an enviable emotional stability, onto someone who doesn’t use them at all.”

When did having lots of followers lose its inherent appeal? It’s a post-pandemic phenomenon. During the height of COVID, online followings surged as cooped-up people across the planet spent more time looking at screens. TikTok, newly popular in the United States, had a turbocharged algorithmic feed that made it possible to gain millions of followers literally overnight. Instagram has replicated that strategy with Reels, inspiring hordes of new, successful content creators. But as time has passed the attention of audiences has ebbed in intensity. As users have come to rely more on algorithmic recommendations, they have got used to drifting where the feed brings them rather than intentionally seeking out specific accounts. That means it’s easier to optimize content to exploit the algorithm. Grace Clarke, the head of community at a large e-commerce tech company, told me, “Audience-amassing is actually no longer ‘expensive,’ a.k.a. hard or rare. It’s easy to game.” At the same time, users have been drawn to more individualized digital publishing platforms, ranging from YouTube to Patreon, where small and devoted audiences can congregate around creators of their choosing. According to an analysis carried out for the Financial Times, the over-all time spent on traditional social media peaked in 2022 and has declined ever since. The largest platforms, meanwhile, are populated primarily by passive consumers who don’t care enough to unfollow those they’re no longer interested in. When was the last time you pruned your Facebook friends or evaluated your following list on X?

The appeal of online anti-fame reminds me of a rule that a friend who runs an international company’s social accounts espouses: professional social-media managers should have messy, unoptimized personal accounts. “It’s kind of a flex to have bad photography and unpolished content,” she said. You could produce polished content—it’s your job to know how to, after all—but that doesn’t mean you have to do so in your off-hours. In fact, not hustling too much might paradoxically cast you as more professional and trustworthy, since you’re not caught up perfecting your own profile. The professionalization of social media itself is a big reason why accumulating tons of followers can now seem like a mark of bad taste. Whereas social media in the early twenty-tens tended to be a hobby or a personal passion project, today the relationship between follower and followee has become rampantly commodified. Personal social-media accounts now serve as promotional spaces for podcasts, subscription newsletters, Depop pages, cryptocurrency pyramid schemes, and shopping referral links. Saarim Zaman, the founder of a startup that uses tech to facilitate offline gatherings, told me, “It just feels like everything all of a sudden became transactional.” He cited, as one example, a trend on X of users who respond to breaking-news developments by sharing screenshots of their bets on Polymarket, the site that enables gambling on world events. Those posters are essentially “talking their books,” in finance parlance, the way an investor might promote a startup he has a stake in, trying to get others to buy into their side of the bet and thus boost their potential payout. Cultivating an audience has become increasingly inextricable from trying to turn a profit.