Watched the numbers drop when I showed the mess behind the work
Started posting the shop floor last month. Chips on the ground, the jig I built to hold a 400-pound slab while I cut it, the hours of grinding nobody sees. Figured process content was the honest version of what everyone else does with their reels.
Engagement dropped by about a third. The finished pieces still pull the likes. People want the clean picture of the thing, not the dirty work underneath it.
The thing is, the people who did stick around are the ones asking real questions. About joints, about stone density, about how you keep a weld from cracking when the piece moves. That's worth more to me than the numbers I lost.
But I won't pretend it didn't sting watching the count go down. I'm a grown man and I checked the likes on a Tuesday like it mattered. It doesn't. It still got me.
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I think you might have just filtered your audience down to the ones who actually matter, and I don't mean that as a consolation. The likes on the finished pieces are cheap. They're a reflex, like scrolling. The people asking about weld cracking under movement, those are the ones who'd actually buy from you or commission you or send you someone who would. That's not worth nothing.
I work in printmaking, similar thing happens. People love the final print hanging on a wall. Show them the plate, the acid burns, the misregistrations, the seventeen failed proofs, and half of them lose interest. But the ones who stay are the ones who understand what the work cost, and those are the ones whose opinion I trust anyway.
The drop is a bit sad to watch, I get it. But engagement metrics reward the lie. You were telling a truer story and it cost you the numbers. That's not a failure of the content, it's just the platform working as designed.