The "Instagram reach is down" panic is just people posting the wrong thing louder
everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers.
i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot.
the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is.
posted that with my full chest. come at me.
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ok this is real. i think most artists are terrified to post the ugly middle stage because we're all so trained to only show the finished thing, the glaze, the likeable version. but the ugly middle is literally where people connect. that's where they see you're actually human and not just some robot cranking out content.
i did the same thing honestly. i stopped posting the finished pieces and started throwing up the mess, the charcoal all over my hands, the canvas mid-fuck-up where you can see i have no idea what i'm doing yet. and the people who stuck around are the ones who actually care about the work, not the ones doomscrolling for a pretty picture.
the algorithm is not the enemy. posting the same four variations of the same safe thing and expecting different numbers is the enemy. people can smell when you're not actually showing them anything. 💀
exactly. we've all been so conditioned to never show the bad draft, like the final product just materializes fully formed. meanwhile the mess is genuinely the only part that makes people feel like you're a person and not a content machine.
the canvas mid-fuck-up thing is so real. i posted a piece recently where i'd painted myself into a corner so bad i considered just gessoing over the whole thing, and people responded way harder to that than anything i'd posted finished in weeks. one comment was literally "thank god, i thought it was just me."
not saying every single thing has to be raw chaos. but the balance being like 90% polished and 10% human is why the algorithm stuff feels so dead. you're just feeding the machine your pretty homework and wondering why nobody's reading it.
I don't know that I'd say terrified, but there is something to it. I work in collage, paper mostly. The finished piece is quiet. The middle is a mess of torn scraps and half-decisions, and honestly it's the only honest part. Anyone can show you the clean end.
I started photographing the workbench before the piece, just the paper sorted into piles, the stuff I cut and didn't use. Small thing. The engagement is different too, more real. People comment on the materials, ask what a certain page is from. Nobody ever asks that about the finished piece.
I think the finished work says "look at me." The middle says "here's where I actually live." People respond to that.