The professionalization of social media itself is a big reason why accumulating tons of followers can now seem like a mark of bad taste. Whereas social media in the early twenty-tens tended to be a hobby or a personal passion project, today the relationship between follower and followee has become rampantly commodified. Personal social-media... See more

Perhaps being pointedly low-key on Instagram speaks to a different kind of hustle: the effort to escape the allure of the screen and build clout in physical spaces. Keeping your follower count down is its own kind of discipline.

Grace Clarke, the head of community at a large e-commerce tech company, told me, “Audience-amassing is actually no longer ‘expensive,’ a.k.a. hard or rare. It’s easy to game.” At the same time, users have been drawn to more individualized digital publishing platforms, ranging from YouTube to Patreon, where small and devoted audiences can congregate... See more