The follow lie, and why it’s worse than ever

That little button, the one saying ‘follow’? It’s lying to you.

The follow lie is a classic tale of enshittification that’s occurred on nearly every social media platform. It’s pretty simple:

You join a social media platform and find some people who interest you. You tap follow (or ‘Add friend’, ‘Like page’, ‘Subscribe’), because you want to see their content. For a while, everything works just fine. You see your best friend’s wedding photos, your favourite blogger’s posts.

Soon though, the follow lie kicks in. Something happens. You start seeing a lot less of people you follow, and a lot more of people you don’t follow. But you’re still stuck on the platform, because of all that time you’ve invested in following people there (after all, you still see some of their content) — and a lot of the new stuff you get shown, from people you don’t follow, is addictive. It keeps you scrolling to see what’s up next. The platform benefits by slipping in more and more ads around the content.

This is terrible for consumers like you, but it’s also terrible for creators. They invested a lot of time and effort in getting people to follow them on the platform, and now they realize what a waste it was.

Most often the follow lie is a boiling frog, but sometimes the rug gets pulled from underfoot very suddenly. I remember when this happened to me with Underground Magazine, a satirical publication (like The Onion) that some friends and I launched in 2012. At some point in (I think) 2013, practically overnight, Facebook stopped showing our content to our page’s 1,000 fans unless we paid. We started reaching just 50 people with each post. Almost every publication on Facebook at that time has a similar story (and things got a whole lot worse from then on).

The follow lie is an example of history endlessly repeating itself. It happens time and time again on every single platform. I’ve recently heard of TikTok stars with millions of followers struggling to get even 5,000 views on their videos — a conversion of just 0.5% to people who explicitly opted in to following you!

In this era, any creator with a strategy around follows on a platform needs to exercise extreme caution. That’s because things are getting worse: nearly all social media platforms are now prioritizing the interest graph, instead of the social graph.

The interest graph doesn’t care who you follow. The interest graph uses data on the exact content you consume (down to how much of a video you watch) to serve up the content candy it knows will get you hooked. So for both consumers and creators, that means following is more of a sham than ever — following is practically irrelevant to the platform’s intentions for you. TikTok caused our present day spiral towards the interest graph, by showing that it’s by far the most effective way to dominate consumers’ attention.

What can you do in response? As both a creator or a consumer, use newsletters. Rely on email to show you content from people you’re interested in.

It’s not perfect, and big tech can still cause you problems — for instance, for Gmail users, a lot of your emails may end up in the Promotions tab dustbin (check it regularly to see what’s ended up there).

But it’s a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe in the follow lie.