The Death of the Follower

During his 2024 SXSW keynote speech, Patreon’s founder and CEO, Jack Conte, developed an intriguing idea: the “death of the social media follower.” What does this mean?

Conte went through a timeline for the evolution of social media, a key fundamental in the rise of the current creator’s economy. With social media, Conte said, a musician like him who would play at empty bars during his youth could finally reach an audience.

Conte’s historical recount brought back a remembrance of how social media platforms used to present their users’ posts as a continued time linearity. Even the name was there: “timeline” was what users were exposed to. A line of posts would appear on followers’ and subscribers’ screens according to the time they were posted.

Winds of change: Facebook starts experimenting with non-linear timelines

Then, in 2010, Facebook decided to start ranking posts according to their engagement. Gone was the linear timeline.

While this was a fantastic change for Facebook, it was not as good for artists and creators: now they were subject to the unknown rules of Facebook’s proprietary algorithm. If an artist wanted their content to be noticed by their Facebook fans, they would need to tweak their posts to get more and more engagement. The entire idea of subscribing to an artist and seeing when they posted new art fell apart. Not only that, but the promise of community building that social media had brought to creators, the ability it had given them to communicate directly with their fans, was taken apart.

And then TikTok entered the game and further changed the old ways

When TikTok started to gain steam during the 2020s, it brought a more radical change to the social media ecosystem: the complete obliteration of the traditional timeline.

TikTok was all about generating the most engagement possible, so the idea of subscribing to individual creators was no longer relevant. Instead, TikTok introduced the “For You” feed: an algorithmically curated timeline that suggests content based on what would most resonate with each user.

With this new form of organization, it was no longer the user’s responsibility to curate the creators that interested them, but TikTok’s. And it worked. It worked so well that all the other social media platforms had to move further away from their traditional forms of ranking and time-bound timelines. Apart from YouTube bringing “Shorts” and Instagram doing the same with their “Reels,” the most notorious change came when Twitter started showing a “For You” tab, filled with tweets from accounts that users do not necessarily follow but Twitter’s algorithm determines that are prone to generate engagement.

According to Conte, the dawn of TikTok was the final nail in the coffin of traditional social media timelines. And he is right. Just check your Facebook feed right now and see how much of the content you see comes from people you “befriended” on the platform or pages you have liked. Just a tiny fraction. This, for brands and artists, means that their fans are seeing less of their content. ?

2020s: The Death of the Follower Era

Conte is clear that the Death of the Follower Era is painful for him as an artist and many other creators. But he thinks there is still hope: creator economies exist. Web pages like Gumroad, Substack, his platform Patreon, and others still exist to provide a safe space on the web for creators to build communities.

The problem has always been how to be discoverable while gaining a robust following base.

For a long time, social media was extremely useful for artists to gain awareness about their art, although it was also tricky and slow. We now have an ecosystem where getting noticed might not be that difficult, but building a fanbase, a following base, is much more complex than before.

What happens after the Death of the follower?

While it is clear that the path forward for traditional social media platforms will probably continue to be based on the “for you” economy, platforms such as Patreon, Substack, Medium, and others have been trying to integrate some aspects of how traditional social media platforms used to work into their subscription models.

In Conte’s vision, a market exists for creators and artists who want to establish genuine connections with their fans. This market is not only about engagement numbers, followers, or subscribers but fundamentally about establishing and maintaining deep bonds with true fans.

I think this lesson is one that artists, creators, and brands should consider. Their path forward lies in investing in their true fans, communicating with and reaching out to them, and creating with passion, not just looking for cheap tricks to boost vanity metrics.

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