I have been on Instagram for a long time, like since the beginning long time and over the years I have learned a thing or two about the platform, one of them being that it does not like me.

I have thought a lot about this from time to time. Am I just unlikeable? Am I unrelatable? Why are some photos and stories shown to 7x the amount of people than others are? What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? When I put in more effort to create and engage it seems like I am punished in return. What are you to do when a social media platform rejects you?

A lot of people fall into this camp based on the number of articles and courses that exist out there, all claiming to crack the ever changing algorithm and bring you the success and reach you desire. Tips range and are sometimes contradictory. Be consistent in your posts, but only post top quality content and no need for multiple posts a day. Reasonable. Use hashtags, but make sure they are the right ones and not too many. Don’t use hashtags at all. Never use them in comments. Post at a specific time. Post only Reels or whatever the new thing they’re pushing is. Don’t change anything. Change everything. Honestly, it feels like me trying to do my own taxes. Wasn’t social media supposed to be fun?

As an exercise while trying to grow my brand I decided to keep a diary to help me work through my thoughts, frustrations, and plans and it has helped me immensely to make sense of this all and continue writing/sharing/creating content that I am proud of. It is insanely frustrating to see your reach vary so much without making any changes. I see other accounts come out of nowhere and grow at a rapid pace appearing to do a lot less to get there and wonder what tricks they have up their sleeve or if they are just getting lucky.

Lately I have seen a lot of influencers announce that they are planning to step back from platforms like Instagram and move the bulk of their content back to their own sites or to TikTok and I get it. I am there with them. I realized the other day while chatting with a friend about tanning drops that I have not seen the girl who turned me on to them in my feed in roughly a year. I still follow her. Instagram has for whatever reason decided that I don’t need to see what she’s up to. She still shares posts and stories every day, they are just not served to me. What is worse though is that I didn’t notice she was missing. I know there are many others I follow whose content hasn’t appeared in my feed in a long time as well. But the effort in going digging for it, why? I chose to follow the accounts that I follow. I shouldn’t have to work to find them. There are so many questions around reach and who is shown what content and why and what they think you want to see. It would be much simpler if they would just let us decide what we want to see and leave the predictions to the explore page, but I do not work there and that is not for me to decide.

It’s time for a change. I am shifting my main focus back to blogging. In my walkthrough post of the new design I touched on that fact that I miss the early days of blogging. Things were simple then—you followed and read blogs that you enjoyed and built friendships one comment at a time. As Instagram boomed everything shifted and I am now lucky if I see one of those friends in my feed. I still make an effort to check in on my favorite blogs, and I am certain there are others out there like me that do the same.

Social media has so many fleeting moments, and as it continues to evolve to compete, I just don’t get the same joy out of spending time on Instagram that I used to. It doesn’t like me, and I don’t think I like it anymore either. I will continue posting content to Instagram, but I am not going to waste so much of my time trying to make it work there. Unpaid, the platform has proven to be impossible to work with.

At the end of the day, this site is a space that I own, where I can share the content I dream up with my readers without fear of being punished for using hashtags in a comment. I think that taking a step back, placing the focus back on blogging, and maybe moving on to TikTok is best.

If you made it to the end of this, thank you and I love you.