Why early success online is a trap
How could achieving success online possibly be a bad thing?
To illustrate, take a look at these two social media accounts. Which one would you rather have?
Obviously, you’d want Account 1 because it has more subscribers, right?
Account 1 on the left with 45 million subscribers is MrBeast Gaming, a channel focused on video games whose average audience is an 18-34 year-old man in the United States.1
But Account 2, the smaller channel on the right with only 9 thousand subscribers is Foreign Policy, a magazine read by presidents and CEOs of major companies.
Not all followers are the same. Would you rather be followed by millions of gamers or a few dozen world leaders?
If you want to influence the world and how it is run, you’d rather be Foreign Policy than Mr. Beast. But is this really a fair comparison?
Mr. Beast is probably not trying to influence world governments;2 so far it seems like he just wants to make entertaining YouTube videos.3 With his influence and reach though, he could try pivoting into politics, but if he decides to make videos beyond the types of topics he already makes, it will be hard for him to do so without sacrificing a large number of subscribers.4
There’s nothing wrong with running a gaming channel instead of a politics channel. They’re two different topics with different aims and separate audiences.
But if your goal is to educate people about diet and exercise, get your audience to donate to rescuing animals, or find hidden wisdom by analyzing fortune cookie messages, don’t get jealous of a gaming channel that has a billion views, or try to copy what they do—unless you’re sure that you want the same followers.
Trapped by the algorithm
Attracting the “wrong” followers is bad for your mental health.
When you’re trying to grow on social media, you have a mental burden in attracting followers and keeping them engaged. It gets tougher when you start comparing yourself to others who seem to have a bigger audience. Why should they deserve their followers when your content is so much better?5
If you only chase clout—with no purpose, end goals, or grand plans for greater impact—you end up creating random videos until one goes viral. Then you feel pressured to hyper-focus on creating variations of your viral video, because that seems to be the only thing that “works”.
I feel sorry for Alison Burke, otherwise known as the “Square Hole Girl”. She became a popular meme after one of her reaction videos went viral and racked up millions of views. But she’s more than that one reaction video—she also uploads other funny comedy videos, although those don’t get as many views as when she just uploads other variations of the Square Hole meme, and it’s tough to feel unappreciated for anything other than just being a meme.
Rebecca Black spoke about how she struggled to find her way after she unexpectedly went viral for her music video Friday back in 2011. She needed to take a break and “start over” so she could develop a strong creative vision and eventually attract a fanbase she actually wanted, instead of milking her viral Friday fame by catering to her cyberbullies.
Recommendation algorithms make it tough for you to get out of the wrong niche. If all you make is gaming videos about Minecraft, you’ll find it difficult to suddenly branch out and start releasing music videos.
The algorithm will penalize you when your music videos are recommended to gamers who aren’t interested in it, and it won’t recommend your videos to listeners interested in your music, because it already labelled you as a “gaming YouTuber”.
If you try a new niche anyway, you’ll lose the views and followers you got from your old niche, and that’s extremely psychologically tormenting.
Becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. Losing fame is miserable.
— Will Smith, via Morgan Housel
The Internet plays a trick on your brain where losing followers makes you feel like it is a rejection of you, not just a rejection of your content. And thousands (or millions) of people rejecting you is probably the worst possible form of torture you can inflict on the human limbic system.
For the millions of years that our brains have evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer bands, we needed each others’ help and could not survive in the wilderness alone—being rejected was a path that led to certain death.
PrankvsPrank was a couple on YouTube who made videos pranking each other, but to stay relevant and entertaining they had to keep escalating their pranks to be more extreme and emotionally devastating.
The couple eventually broke up, citing the stress of daily vlogging. We don’t know what happened behind closed doors and if that was the real reason, but as YouTube was their main source of income, I can imagine the huge financial burden was extremely dysfunctional when your livelihood depends on deceiving your partner with pranks every day—this seems like a perfect recipe for destroying any trust you had in your intimate romantic relationship.
You become trapped by the algorithm, like you’ve lost control of your own destiny, as you perform for an unseen and capricious boss.6 You have too much to lose and can’t start over with what you really want.
Starting over in life
To roll a snowball down a hill, you start by scooping up some snow that you can roll around in any way you want. But as you roll your snowball downhill, it gets bigger and faster until you can’t keep up with it anymore. Suddenly, your fate is set—all you can do is watch helplessly as it rolls away to its final destination.
When we were kids, we discovered that we weren’t yet interesting, unique, or good at anything, so we grabbed onto any tiny thing that could make us stand out from our siblings and classmates.
Maybe we get praised one day for how smart we are for saying a big, multisyllabic word like “umbrella”, or crack a small joke that gets some laughs, or receive a compliment for how pretty we are. We seize upon this minor bit of flattery and start adopting it into our personality, building the first bits of our snowball.
One day in college you try on a friend’s handmade scarf, and she says “it really suits you!” so you decide to take a fashion design class. You attend weekly extracurricular sessions just to socialize at first but you keep improving your skills over the course of the semester, and by the time you graduate, you’ll have spent hundreds of hours learning different sewing techniques, perfecting your pattern-making, memorizing fashion history, and experimenting with various fabrics and textures.
Now, it’ll be “obvious” to everyone that you have a future career in fashion design; after all, you already spend your idle time sketching new styles and daydreaming in the shower about colour combinations.
By this time, the snowball is too big and too fast—it would be a shame to suddenly change course even if you never truly enjoyed fashion to begin with. Why abandon your talents? After all that effort?
If you’re not careful to pick where you want to end up at the bottom of the hill, you may land somewhere you don’t want to be, all because of some initial steps you took at the top of the hill.
But being unable to change direction is just an illusion. It’s just very uncomfortable to restart at the top of the hill, because it will seem like you wasted all this time to start over with something you’re not good at.
When I was young, I thought that I was “naturally” bad at sports. But I didn’t realize my classmates were not spending their time reading books or daydreaming about math puzzles the same way I was; instead, they were visualizing their proprioception, practicing their balance, and developing body awareness. The truth is that if I had put more time and energy into those things, I would have been athletic too.7
Why didn’t I put more energy into exercise? Because I wanted to be praised for being smart. That’s how I formed my identity growing up, but it became too late to change it after I grew up. The snowball rolled too far away.
We have higher expectations for adults than we do for kids, so it’s easy to praise kids for any clumsy attempt they make, but we don’t extend the same grace to adults.
I later learned to become athletic, but it wasn’t until after many years of working out that I finally got to a level where people suddenly started complimenting me on my physique. However, to get there I had to toil at a skill I was bad at every day for years with almost no positive feedback.
When I write, it can feel like I’m screaming into the void. Is anyone even reading this? Does anyone even care?
In the end, there’s only one follower that matters: me. As long as I’m writing something that makes me proud, then that’s a success. But if you enjoyed reading this, and you want to subscribe to the email list to read more essays like this, then that makes me very happy too 😊
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We don’t know the actual audience demographics for MrBeast Gaming specifically, but this estimate is based on general gaming demographics from Statista and Tubular Labs. ↩
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Although he did want to run for president of the United States. ↩
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From the leaked Mr. Beast memo: “Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.” ↩
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This analysis is illustrative of how he is confined by his followers because of the constraints of the algorithms that he seeks to appease. ↩
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If you’re Christian, remember that Jesus only had 12 followers. ↩
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Paul Graham writes:
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They’re like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.
Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.