What You Think Is Community Is Really a Pact of Mediocrity
To Strengthen Each Other's Numbers Is to Weaken Each Other's Voice
I post things.
After I post, I glance at the numbers, see nothing moving, close the app, and start thinking about what to write next.
But I keep noticing something happening right around me. A lot of small creators actively form clusters: follow each other, like each other, push each other’s numbers up. You boost mine, I boost yours. You give me a little, I give you a little back. Everyone knows what they’re doing. Everyone knows why.
Watching this, I feel a resistance.
Not superiority. I know the pull is real, and I know why it’s strong. When your content gets no response, that impulse to lift each other up genuinely surfaces. I just know where that pull leads.
So I don’t follow it — not because I’m taking a moral stance. But because I don’t want my writing to serve that thing first, and worry about the actual content second.
Still, I want to go one level deeper on why that pull is so strong.
These systems quantify your worth through likes, follower counts, and engagement rates.
Every time you post something, a number immediately tells you what you’re worth today. When there’s no response, it feels like a void — a silent negation. When there is a response, it becomes something instant and concrete, a small reassurance.
And people can be slowly conditioned by that reassurance.
Over time, the numbers begin to shape how you work. You adjust yourself around them — when to post, what to post, how to phrase it, which angles get shared, which endings make people save, which topics generate discussion. Each adjustment is small. Small enough that it feels like optimization, like getting better at the craft.
But small doesn’t mean costless.
Accumulated, the thing you’re doing has quietly become a different thing. You’re still writing. You’re still posting. But the place you’re starting from has shifted. The drift is usually silent, gradual, nearly impossible to notice. Like water slowly rounding a stone — the stone doesn’t register the moment it changed. It only looks back one day and finds the shape is no longer the shape it was.
The mutual-follow, mutual-like clusters are simply the most honest version of this logic.
No disguise, no packaging. Just a direct acknowledgment: I’ll trade you my attention for yours, your system reward for mine. We all know how the game works, so let’s run up the score together.
The problem is that the attention you get in return isn’t because what you said moved someone. It’s because you handed them a number and they handed one back.
The numbers go up. But the dissatisfaction usually stays. Not because the numbers didn’t go up enough — because that increase has nothing to do with what you actually made. What you received was the system’s reward, not a real response. They look like the same thing. They never were.
So that kind of connection is hollow from the start. Both parties received what the system recognizes. But between them, nothing actually happened.
And the problem doesn’t stop there.
The deeper issue is that the system has no way of knowing what any given like actually means.
One kind of like comes because a sentence genuinely reached someone. They don’t know how to respond, so they press the button — like saying: I’m here. I read this.
Another kind of like comes because the content was stimulating enough, strange enough, attention-grabbing enough that tapping was easy.
The system sees the same number.
It doesn’t know — and doesn’t care — how far apart those two likes are. To the system, they weigh the same. They’re worth the same. They’re equally worth recommending forward.
This isn’t a flaw in the system.
It’s the nature of the system.
It was never designed to tell the difference.
So what the system actually optimizes for has never been “what content has value” — it’s been “what content keeps people scrolling, keeps them engaging, keeps them coming back.”
These two things sometimes overlap. They are not the same thing. What makes someone linger isn’t necessarily what moves them. What genuinely moves someone isn’t necessarily what satisfies the algorithm. The system optimizes for the first. It has no interest in the second — and no capacity to measure it.
So when a person begins using these numbers to measure what they’ve made, they’ve picked up the wrong ruler.
That ruler wasn’t built for this. Use it, and you can only ever measure what the system happens to be able to capture — the outermost layer, the most imitable layer, the most easily mass-produced layer.
The deeper layer, it cannot see.
You wrote something.
Someone read it late at night. Maybe just before sleep, the room already quiet, the phone screen still lit. Maybe during a stretch of time that was hard to get through — their finger scrolling down, line by line, until it hit a particular passage and stopped.
Something shifted inside them. Not this is useful, let me save it — something deeper than that, quieter, harder to name. Like hearing someone say, on their behalf, a thing they’d always known but could never quite get out.
They didn’t follow you. They might not have even liked the post. They just closed the tab and fell asleep.
And you never received a notification telling you: you reached someone.
It happened. Then it disappeared into the data, as if nothing had occurred.
But it happened.
Some things happen without being recorded.
Unrecorded doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.
What the system can see is the layer most easily quantified. What the system cannot see is, often, where things actually happen.
If a person defines their worth only by what the system can see, they will slowly come to believe that the deeper place is empty.
But it isn’t empty. It’s just quiet.