The old saying goes, “if you’re not paying for the product, the product is you.” When we think about social media and that relationship, most of us know that our demographic information is being collected for advertisers. However, the constantly hungry and mindless algorithm is also hunting for content, swallowing up artists in order to provide users with the things that keep them using the site.

Every Friday I get on TikTok and upload the Friday Nightmare, a short horror story I recite preceded by a (usually bad) joke. That’s pretty much all I do on TikTok aside from occasional comedy or personal bits. The Friday Nightmare is my brand, generating a small but consistent number of views.

I cannot overstate how much TikTok HATES me doing it this way. Not a day goes by that the app doesn’t encourage me to try something else like do a little dance to a new popular sound or comment on a trending topic. It offers me discounts on ads and implies preferential treatment if I stick my hand into the churning machinery of the algorithm and feed it some more of what’s currently popular.

I don’t do that because frankly I am too exhausted. However, I’ve watched a lot of other creators fall into the lure, and I think it is actively making the internet a shallower, less nuanced place. The algorithm demands constant evolution and attention to trend, no matter what it is you actually do on the site.

It’s why people who make an initial splash as make up artists or singers or activists for specific causes end up having to have opinions on, say, Gaza, or MAGA, or DEI leading to a boat disaster. The audience doesn’t help. About the time you get above 25,000 followers, you’re going to start drawing in weirdoes with very unhealthy parasocial relationship tendencies. They’ll demand you “break your silence” or be damned by it, as if the actions of world governments need the random comments of a cat vlogger just because they’re famous.

Lots of times, those creators cave to the pressure and end up pissing people off because they are not actually experts in the thing that is trending. The algorithm, though, does not care. Whether people are cheering you or calling for your head, it only reads that as “engagement,” and engagement is good. In a way, the constant cycle of people rising in popularity and then falling from grace is the perfect life cycle for the algorithm. It swallows creativity, processes it into random commentary on the current trend, shits out the creator, and then reaches for the next person that got fat and popular commenting on the whole mess.

It’s also dangerous. You know what the algorithm really likes? Kidnapping conspiracies. Channels that used to get a few thousand views on Instagram can shoot up into the millions by pushing the idea some random Hispanic people were looking to abduct a child in the Michael’s parking lot. Millions of views translates into influence, Patreon supporters, and social cache. Who cares if it helps make the entire country more of a racist and paranoid mess?

I recently had a chance to interview Marc Furi over the class he teaches at the University of Houston about Prince. We discussed the legendary vault that was left over after His Royal Badness died. Prince would record whole songs, but feel they weren’t right for whatever “era” he was in at the moment. Instead, he saved them until the right album came along. Sometimes it never did.

I wonder how Prince would have survived as an artist where the hungry algorithm is built into the foundation of entertainment. Hold something back? In this economy?! No sir. Put it in the machine. It runs on content and it is starving.

Trying to keep up with this content junkie of an algorithm is madness. Playing catch up to a nebulous, all-powerful present means little time to reflect on what we’re actually doing or perfect a work or thought. Unfortunately, if you can’t produce immediately, the algorithm will leave you behind for someone who will, and I just don’t think it’s making the world a better place.