Instagram is changing what “good” looks like, and it’s not the kind of change you can fix with a new lens or cleaner color. If you keep posting work that looks polished and still get silence, this video lays out a reason that’s hard to ignore.
Coming to you from Chrystopher Rhodes, this blunt video starts with a post from Instagram Head Adam Mosseri about where Instagram is headed and how AI has warped what people trust online. Rhodes zeroes in on one line about “trust” and “authenticity,” then builds a bigger point around it without turning it into a motivational speech. He describes the current feed as a place where you can find anything, instantly, which makes it easier to doubt everything, instantly. That’s the setup for his main question: why do simple, imperfect posts often outperform carefully produced work that took forever. He doesn’t answer it with platform tricks, and he doesn’t tell you to chase trends.
Rhodes rewinds to 2016 and talks about what used to separate creators: not just talent, but access and know-how. He says quality was scarce then, tutorials were scarce, and if you could make something look cinematic at all, you stood out fast. He gives a concrete example that will sound familiar if you were building kits back then: a Panasonic Lumix GH4 on a DJI Ronin-M plus a few effects in Premiere Pro felt like a cheat code. He links that era to why behind-the-scenes videos and technique breakdowns used to pull big attention, since fewer people could replicate the look. He frames it as a market gap that closed, not a golden age that needs to come back. If you learned your craft through that wave of tutorials, you’ll recognize what he’s describing in your own feed habits.
Then he gets to the part that stings: once everyone has the basics, “good-looking” becomes the baseline, and the baseline stops earning a reaction. He points to patterns you’ve watched get normalized, like the drone shot going from “how did they do that” to “nice,” or 120 fps slow motion going from a flex to something that can feel sleepy. Gimbal movement used to announce effort, and now it can read like default mode, even when it’s executed well. He adds AI into that pile, not as a moral panic, but as another reason perfection is easy to generate and easy to scroll past. He says the internet is in an “everything looks amazing” era, and he includes the iPhone as proof that the floor is high even before you open an editor. When the floor is high, people start hunting for signals that a real person is on the other side of the screen.
Rhodes argues that the signal people respond to is imperfection with a pulse, not low effort and not sloppy work. He talks about making a vulnerable video about being addicted to work and short on time for family, and how uncomfortable it felt to put that online. The point isn’t that confession gets views, it’s that honesty changes how your audience reads you. He phrases it as “Quality got me my audience. Humility kept it,” which lands like a warning if you’re stuck polishing the life out of every post. He also calls out a common habit: re-recording a clip nine times, then realizing the first take felt most like you, which is exactly the kind of tiny decision that can strip a voice out of your work. He keeps circling back to the same tension: when everyone can make something look perfect, the risk is that your work starts to feel like a mask even when you’re proud of it. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Rhodes.
2 Comments
You say doesn't reward effort anymore. I've been on Instagram for a few years now and it's never rewarded effort as far as I'm concerned. I use IG just to upload what I think are my best photos, just to have somewhere to show people my portfolio. I can't justify the cost of my own website just yet and the fact my IG gets next to no traction is a good reason paying for my own website is not currently a good option. The only way to guarantee any success on IG is to be a young attractive woman...or just post photos/videos of young attractive women no matter what the quality of the photos or videos is like 😉. Thousands of perverts will flock to your channel in no time! 😂
I think IG absolutely still rewards effort and always has. For my part, I do notice an uptick in reach if I go hard and post multiple times per day. It isn't a huge uptick, but I essentially go from 0 to not 0. ;) I did an experiment a while back where I forced myself to post multiple times per day for a couple of months. I knew it wasn't sustainable because the style of work I create just can't be created at a high enough volume to maintain that but I wanted to see what it would do. I'd say the experiment was a success, I got more new followers in that 60 days than the last 5 years. So, yes, IG does reard effort, but that comes with a few caveats:
1. It doesn't reward all effort equally. You have to play their game.
2. Instagram is NOT a showcase of creative work anymore. It is a platform that rewards making a spectacle of yourself. YOU are the content, not your work. Personally, I detest this, but I'd be naive not to recognize it. I follow a lot of top performing wildlife photogs on IG and there is one pattern I've noticed most of them follow: If you look at their IG feed there are shockingly few images of animals. Rather, their feeds are mostly reels and photos of them holding big lenses in the field. IG rewards pointing the camera at yourself.
3. There are thresholds. The difference between posting once a month, once a week, once a day, and multiple times per day is huge. The content still has to be engaging, but, for the most part, no matter how high quality your work is, posting once per month or even week is never going to see growth unless you get lucky and go hella viral.
4. As a consumer of IG, the app is terrible now, in my opinion. I don't see content I want to see. At the top of my feed I see maybe one post from people I follow and then it says: "You are all caught up" and the "Scroll" is just filled with random viral slop or content sorta adjacent to what I actually am interested in. I find I have to constantly use the "not interested" button to teach the algorithm what I don't like, and then a few weeks later it seems to forget and my feed is all viral slop again. I've given up. The app is no longer on my phone, as a consumer, I just don't enjoy using it. I still post to my accounts using Buffer just so I "have" an active IG for social proof, but I've stopped caring about actually using it or growing it.
5. And finally, this one is probably the most important. IG is not oriented around helping rising content find an audience anymore. Rather, its built to help already viral content get even more viral. Its extremely hard to find rising content even if you are looking for it. Scroll down your feed, every post will have thousands of likes. Gone are features that showcases new or rising content. Hashtags have been de-valued to the point of being irrelevant. Instagram is INTENTIONALLY making it hard for you to find content that isn't already popular. Either a post goes super viral right away or it falls off into the void.
This week one of my good friends was like: "I really want to see your wildlife photography!", So I sent her a link to my IG and we realized she already followed me but IG has never shown her any of my photos even though we are close friends and have been for a decade. This is modern IG. You don't even get to see what your friends are doing, even if you both follow each other unless you are both viral sensations.
TLDR: IG rewards high effort if it produces highly frequent content AND it makes YOU the content, your work is irrelevant. (Also, it has to be good, though good is defined as 'engaging', no more, no less)