Losing followers isn't always a bad thing

01/23/25 • 11 min

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

And today I want to talk about followers, especially I, as you may already have seen in the title to this episode, I want to talk about losing followers.

And when I say how to lose followers, it might seem like I'm trying to warn you about what not to do. Like I'm being ironical somehow. I'm being sarcastic. I'm telling you by saying how to lose followers. What I want you to think is that you shouldn't lose followers. But I'm actually being serious and sincere. I really am going to tell you how to lose followers.

Because believe it or not, sometimes... that is a good thing. We all create in social media and we are given to understand that having a lot of followers or having a huge platform is a good thing. And that's not entirely incorrect. But while a lot of us create content and talk and write, etc. online, thinking that we are giving people something, that we are bringing change in people's lives, what we remain unaware of is the fact that our followers also change us. And this happens more and more as time passes.

So let me explain to you what I mean by that first. What I mean is that your name is Raju and you start a YouTube channel. You start putting out videos about what you think is good with the world, what you believe in, what you enjoy, et cetera. You talk about your passions and your interests. And you convey information and ideas about the things that you think are important.

And then time passes and you begin to get an audience which is interested in the kind of thing that you're talking about. Some more time passes and you reach a wall. You hit a wall where the number of people who are likely to be interested in the kind of thing that you're talking about is limited. And therefore, you kind of got into where you can be. If you're talking about your interests and not some generic topic that is trending, then you will eventually hit a wall of some sort unless you diversify.

So in order to change things, in order to make sure that your audience, your rate of growth does not plateau, you diversify. You start talking about other things. You start talking about a thing that happened once and got you a lot of views. So you come to the conclusion that if I talk about this more... then more people will come and watch and it works. So you keep doing that. You keep diversifying, you keep changing, you keep making new things, you keep getting more followers.

With time, you eventually get to a point where you are no longer talking about the thing that you wanted to talk about when you started your channel. You're no longer talking about the thing that you are passionate about, and you're now talking about things that people want to hear from you. You got followers because that is what you aimed for. You got more followers than you needed. And that is why you can no longer break free from the cycle that requires you to continuously feed that follower machine.

Not all your followers are the same follower. They're not all good for you. Some of your followers are actually good for you. They want to follow you for the reasons that you want to be followed. But some others will follow you because they want you to do what they want. And that's not necessarily something hard to understand. That is how the online ecosystem works. That is how the algorithm works.

I recently wrote an essay in which I gave the rather insensitive example of someone's family member dying. Suppose your name is Kaju and a family member dies and you make a video about it and that video gets a lot of traffic. Now, conventional wisdom will have you thinking, hmm, this is what people like. Maybe I should do more of it. How will you do more of it? How will you make more videos about the death of your family member without looking cheap, without looking like a sellout, without looking like someone who's fleecing the algorithm for all it's worth by making money using a personal tragedy? You can't. Unless you're shameless. In which case, congratulations!

And the weirdest thing about all this is that these days followers don't even matter that much. Followers, subscribers, whatever you want to call them on social media, they don't really matter much. There are channels with millions of subscribers who get 10 people watching when they live stream. There are channels with small subscriber bases, which are much more loyal and much more regularly viewing their content. There are Instagram accounts with millions of followers. And you'll find that the only people who comment on their posts are those 10 people who followed them since the beginning or worse bots.

These days when you log on to your social media feed, the thing that you see is what the algorithm has decided you should see. It is not based on who you follow, who you subscribe to, etc. The algorithm is now feeding you what it thinks you will watch. And it is...

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

And today I want to talk about followers, especially I, as you may already have seen in the title to this episode, I want to talk about losing followers.

Previous Episode

Is Mark Zuckerberg ending social media?

Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool.

In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to treat certain topics as things that should not be spread, and certain topics as things that should be spread. They bend over backward to accommodate this. They do anything they can to make the minister, the political party, or anyone who follows that political ideology happy. They don’t care about anything other than the fact that their profit margins might be affected by those in power being unfriendly towards them, leading to the potential loss of government ads or some such issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who’s at the helm of Meta Platforms (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatnot), has decided to go full-on Godi Media. In anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to power, he is making some bizarre changes to the social media platforms he owns and controls. I am not complaining that Facebook is going to end. I’m a huge fan of the current social networks ending and being replaced by something more valuable—something that is genuinely a social network. But even I did not anticipate that this manner of suicide would be committed by someone like Mark Zuckerberg.

Let me tell you what all he’s doing to Meta, and then you can tell me if you think this is better for the company or for social media. The first move is this: Meta now allows people to call LGBTQ+ people mentally ill. I don’t even know where to begin with this. You have a social network, and a huge number of people who use the social network are non-binary, non-heterosexual, or non-gender normative. They rely on social media as a place to express themselves because their family, friends, and the places where they live are not friendly toward their existence. They have managed to build communities online by making use of the social network. But now, the social network is saying, “We are going to subject them to the same kind of bullying that they experience in the real world.” Meta is not going to protect them.

There was even a news item about certain themes in chat that allowed people to express their LGBTQ+ identities, and now those themes are being removed because Mark Zuckerberg is afraid that homophobes, transphobes, and others will get offended by Meta allowing people to express their gender identity. Even people within Meta are unhappy about this because they fear that this is not only a terrible thing to do but might also backlash and harm the company. This is understandable. But Facebook has never stood on its own two feet when it comes to relationships with those in power. If Mark Zuckerberg can bend over backward to accommodate the Hindutva crowd in India, it’s not surprising that his subservience to those in power would eventually affect his business decisions in the U.S.

Another recent news item discusses how Meta is now encouraging the creation of AI bots on its platforms. Soon, users will interact with AI bots online the same way they interact with real humans. This raises a fundamental question: What does “social” mean in social media? Is it interactions between humans and machines, machines and humans, or humans and humans enabled by machines? I may be old-fashioned, but I come from an era where “social” meant people talking to each other. I also recall TikTok’s assertion that Facebook would never compete with them because Facebook’s model is the social graph while TikTok’s model is entertainment. Meta seems to be veering toward TikTok’s direction—becoming an entertainment platform rather than a social network.

We are already talking about the death of the follower. If you’re unfamiliar, look up a talk by Patreon CEO Jack Conte called “The Death of the Follower”. He explains how, in the early 2010s, the “follow” became a fundamental internet architecture, allowing users to follow creators they liked. But now, if you log onto the homepage of any platform, the recommended content is not what you subscribed to but what the algorithm thinks you’d like. This is akin to TV, where you had no choice but to wat...

Next Episode

Should writers focus on art or craft?

Hello friends.

After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.

I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them. I should warn you beforehand that a lot of what I'm about to say is how I do things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in life, and therefore you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. This is how I do things. This is what I think. This is not a universal, "do this and you will get X result" kind of thing.

So, having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the first question that I'm going to address. The topic of this video is a question from Johnny Walker, one, two, three, four. And it goes like this:

Some say the only way to learn writing is to just write. Others say it's a proper craft to be learned. So how do you learn writing? Or rather, I think what they want to ask is how to go about writing. How much attention should you pay to people who say the only way to learn writing is to learn writing, or that the only way to learn writing is to just write?

First of all, you should be slightly suspicious of anyone who starts any piece of advice by saying "the only way," because it's probably the only way they have used, and it worked for them. I'm happy for them. But people should not give advice by saying, "This is the only way to do X," because life is a little more complicated than that. Art definitely is a lot more complicated than that.

So let us focus on the two elements of this question. One is craft—the craft of learning how to write—and then there is just writing. Obviously, you have to do both of these things. You have to learn the craft of writing, and you have to just write the way a writer does. But perhaps it would be good if I started with the difference between art and craft.

What is more important for you as a writer to focus on? Should you focus on the craft of writing, or should you focus on your art? Before I start, let me put it this way. If you announce that your intention is to go to Bhagalpur and you are going to do this on a bicycle, and you tell people, "Look here, I'm about to pick up this bicycle and go all the way to Bhagalpur," then people will come and check you out. People will come and see if you can do it.

Craft is the ability to ride the bicycle. Art is making the journey and getting to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you pedal, and they see you go at least a few meters, then they know that you can get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the ability to get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the skills required to get all the way to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you cannot pedal and you fall down, it doesn't matter if you have the map to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you know how to get to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you have the strength to get to Bhagalpur. You are not going to get to Bhagalpur because you can't cycle.

Craft is the first step. Art is the rest of the journey. So when someone says that you need to know the craft to create your art, they're not wrong. You do need to know how to ride a bicycle in order to get to Bhagalpur. But getting to Bhagalpur is going to require much more than simply cycling because everyone can get to Bhagalpur.

There are other people who will walk to Bhagalpur, there are people who will take the bus—and by bus, I mean AI writing, that infernal thing that is going around right now. And some people are naturally, you know, they live in Bhagalpur. They don't have to cycle to Bhagalpur. So when someone says that the craft of writing is important, what they're really telling you is that the ability to frame your art using the traditions of writing is important, and they're not wrong.

But when they say that the only way to write is by being a good craftsman, then they're probably not right because there have been many great writers who were not great craftsmen, and they have still left great works of art. They created their own craft. There have been writers who created their own ways of writing, who created their own genres. There are writers whose work cannot be classified into a genre. There have been writers who have deliberately broken the rules of craft. There have been writers who have invented new ways of exercising the craft. That’s all possible.

But for the most part, if you're a professional writer and you want to send your manuscript to a publisher, one of the first things the publisher will look at is if you know the craft. When your manuscript gets to a publisher, the editor picks it up, reads t...