Building a Fan Base? Don't Bother

Building an audience in 2025 is a pointless endeavor. Here's why:

The AI algorithmic system has destroyed most platforms for content creators. It's now a road that leads nowhere. Whether it’s YouTube, X, Facebook, Tiktok, etc., having followers does little or nothing for your career. Having fans meant something at one time. Now you can have 100,000 and it means nothing. Because your feed is not your feed anymore. It’s AI-driven, controlled chaos, based on trends, moods, and current headlines. It favors clickbait content, even if the content itself is garbage that offers nothing of value to the reader.

This is why even when you have an audience, you don't have an audience. What good are followers if they never see your stuff? What good are fans if they never get invited to your show? Today's content creators are a brand no more. They’re one-moment-in-time performance devices. All posts and articles are instantly evaluated. Not by your followers, fans, or audience. But by artificial unintelligence. (That's not a type-o.)

Will this content compel the reader to remain on the platform?

That's the ONLY question that matters. It can be the highest quality article or post in earth, and offer invaluable information to readers, but it will be sent to the content graveyard if AI scores it low on the clickbait meter. There's no longer any room for personal expression or independent thought. All that matters is the go-viral potential of that piece. All that matters is whether or not the piece is “sensational” enough to generate clicks and likes. Yes, it's a moronic system.

It’s also a lottery, not a career.

This is because your audience and your subscribers, whether you have many or few, don't see most of what you create anymore. Only strangers do. The feed could care less who you are. The algorithm is inhuman. It's a system that makes it impossible to create long-term relationships. Readers are the various platforms' retention statistics, nothing more, nothing less. The robot no longer asks the question it did years ago: "will this content be valuable to the reader?" The question now is: "will this content–no matter how ridiculous or useless–keep the reader on the platform another five second so we can try to sell him/her something?" The reader is dehumanized along with the people who create the content.

It's a predatory system designed to addict people to platforms and ultimately make them spend money.

For this to change, people would have to stop being victimized and stop taking the bait. Something that is never going to happen. I am a professional writer. I've made my living at it for almost 20 years, and even I'm not sure what the future will hold concerning this new, idiotic system. My only idea is that we find ways, as writers, to create quality content that somehow passes the sensationalism test as well. Is that even possible? Thoughts, anyone?