Three years ago, I stayed up late staring at that skyrocketing follower curve in the backend, thrilled and convinced I had cracked the wealth code.

But very soon, an unannounced throttling issue and an algorithm adjustment made my reach plummet overnight.
It was in that moment that I suffered a painful realization: the 100,000 followers I’d been proud of were actually just rented digital assets.
As soon as the platform revokes my permissions, I can instantly end up with nothing.
In 2026, this sense of crisis over audience ownership feels stronger than ever.
AI-generated junk content is crazily diluting the value of public traffic, and algorithms are no longer a friend to creators—they’re a cold, ruthless machine for distributing traffic.
I started to understand that the real moat has never been the number of followers, but whether you can reach them directly.
My strategy has undergone a fundamental shift.
I’m no longer obsessed with building a perfect persona to please the algorithm; instead, I start turning every single follower into something I can nurture inside my private community and email list.
What I value now are those few thousand super users who are willing to pay me and willing to listen to my real expression.
They aren’t cold, lifeless data—they’re living people.
Only when I can bypass the platform and deliver my thoughts, products, and services straight to them do I truly own my business.
This kind of security is something no amount of “million-follower” reputation can ever provide.
In the future, the most valuable creators may not be the ones with the most followers, but the ones closest to users.