You’re “Renting” Your Followers

I didn’t have the 2+ hours to watch this video podcast with Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte, but one line near the beginning stuck to me:

If only a very small percentage of your following see your work, you don’t have direct connection with them, you’re just renting them.

It’s so true cause now these days when me and my other creative friends post something onto our instagram, about 5% actually engage with it. After a day in a half, your post is considered old and gets put to the bottom of the digital trash bin by the most recent posts of whoever else your fans are following. Then you have to do it again to keep staying relevant to your fans and most likely 5% of them will see it.

It’s been a while posting on Instagram except on my stories page of funny reels. There’s no incentive to post there anymore and I’m not in the least bit interested in turning my photos into reels or moving into the tiktok space. I’m not going to change for an algorithm or for what’s trending right now.

Update 11/5/25

I’m reading this and already contradicting what I thought above cause this past week, I’ve been posting old work on instragram. I guess my reasoning is cause a good amount of my followers only follow me there but I’m trying to use instagram to get my instagram followers to slowly follow me on other channels such as flickr, x, telegram and my mailing list. I think one day instagram will slowly die off, and I’m trying my best just to post there and immediately get off of it.