Good morning. It has become increasingly clear that I have no idea what to do in a snowstorm.
As a recent West Coast transplant to an old East Coast city, I’ve been watching the neighborhood prepare for what I can only describe as a siege, salt, shovels, grocery bags, food prep. I live above a Starbucks, and they’ve reassured me they’ll be open no matter what, which feels… both comforting and kind of dystopian.
Every neighbor has assured me the city is fully prepared for “two to seventy-five inches,” a range so large it feels less like a forecast and more like a test. A friend has confirmed that batched Manhattans will, in fact, be enough to get us through.
It’s hard not to notice: in moments like this, the thing that matters is not information it’s community.
Anyway, pray for me I guess and onto this week’s musing!
The Internet Isn’t Ending.
The internet continues to carry culture forward; people are still publishing, creating, and connecting in ways our parents could scarcely imagine. But something significant has shifted beneath the surface of this ongoing flow: the terms of distribution are no longer the same.
For roughly two decades (2005-2024), a powerful story circulated, often implicitly among creators: show up enough, post often enough, and the network would eventually reward you with attention at scale. The old just post, just post more logic: endlessly repeated, rarely questioned, repackaged as a million different “hacks” and “tips.”
Within that framework, distribution felt neutral, abundant, and surprisingly accessible. Visibility appeared to be a function of persistence rather than position. And in the process, it became easy to forget that we were living through an unusual moment in the long arc of cultural infrastructure, one defined less by permanence than by temporary abundance.
That moment is now receding. What’s ending is not the internet itself, but the promise that reach, attention, and audience-building can be had freely, simply by showing up and meeting an algorithm’s curiosity.
Platforms in their growth phase subsidized attention. They needed content, participation, and scale more than they needed profitability, so they traded potential revenue for engagement. “Free reach” wasn’t a natural property of the internet. It was a structural subsidy embedded in platform economics.
As platforms matured, monetized more aggressively, and prioritized revenue over growth, that subsidy began to evaporate.
Today, reach is rationed. Organic distribution, once treated as a default, has become harder to sustain without paid support, deep relationships, or repeated return visits. Social media no longer functions as a neutral field where visibility accrues simply by being present; it has real, often hidden, costs in attention, labor, and strategic alignment.
This is not a collapse of the internet. It is a correction toward a mode of distribution that resembles historical patterns more than the anomaly we briefly enjoyed: a world where access, trust, and sustained investment matter more than sheer output.
To understand this shift is not to lament loss. It is to recognize that the terms of cultural exchange are evolving, and that the illusion of boundless distribution is giving way to a more relational, and ultimately more durable,logic of attention.
Footnotes:
[1] Platform “subsidy” dynamics: growth-first platform economics (reach as incentive) as discussed across platform strategy literature; this essay builds from that generally accepted framework rather than a single source.
The Structural Decline of Organic Reach
What many artists and creators experience today as frustration, or personal failure, is, in fact, a structural shift. Organic reach did not erode because creators became less compelling. It declined because the economic logic of platforms changed.
During their growth years, social platforms prioritized expansion over monetization. Visibility was used as currency. Algorithms were tuned to encourage participation because participation itself was the product.
As platforms matured, organic distribution was gradually deprioritized in favor of systems that maximize revenue, retention, and predictability. Feeds became less exploratory and more conservative. Content that performs reliably is favored over content that introduces risk. Paid promotion increasingly determines reach. Discovery, once a platform feature, is now an exception.
The practical result is familiar: creators can have large follower counts and still reach only a small fraction of their audience, unless something “spikes,” gets boosted, or aligns perfectly with platform priorities. A healthy organic reach rate, once normal, now often lives in the single digits for many accounts and pages across major platforms.[2]
What changed was not creator behavior. It was incentive structure.
And that shift has consequences beyond metrics. It alters how cultural legitimacy is produced. Visibility is no longer proportional to effort. Consistency no longer guarantees discovery. Novelty alone rarely breaks through without external validation, paid support, or prior momentum.
Distribution is no longer neutral infrastructure. It is an economic system with thresholds and tolls.
What creators are encountering now is not a broken system. It is a system behaving exactly as designed one that no longer subsidizes discovery, and no longer pretends to.
Footnotes (this section)
[2] “Single digits” as a contemporary benchmark framing for organic reach rates is commonly used in social analytics guidance (noting low organic reach rates as normal for many accounts/pages).
What This Means Functionally
When creatives and brands say, “social media doesn’t work like it used to,” they’re rarely talking only about declining reach. What they’re sensing is a deeper functional shift. For a long time, social platforms collapsed several critical roles into a single interface. Today, those roles have quietly separated.
For much of the last decade, social media performed four jobs at once:
- Discovery — it suggested that you exist
- Distribution — it delivered your work to others
- Validation — it signaled social proof
- Retention — it kept people close over time
That configuration no longer holds.
What’s happening is not replacement, but unbundling. Each of these functions still exists, but they are no longer handled by the same systems, nor governed by the same incentives. The feed no longer performs all four roles simultaneously and the confusion many creatives feel comes from continuing to use it as though it does.
Discovery has largely exited the feed. People increasingly encounter new work through adjacency being referenced, forwarded, cited, or embedded inside someone else’s trusted context (Dm’s shares is a great example of this).
Distribution has followed a similar path. It no longer means reaching as many strangers as possible. It means reaching the same people repeatedly without friction. Email lists, subscription newsletters, private links, and small-group channels outperform feeds when it comes to consistency and recall.
Validation has also shifted. Metrics that once stood in for credibility (likes, follows, views) have become suspicious and inflated. What carries weight now is reputation density: who returns, who forwards, who references your work in other rooms. Ten people who act on your ideas matter more than ten thousand who scroll past them.
Retention is perhaps the most misunderstood. It is no longer driven by engagement tricks or dopamine loops. Retention now operates through rhythm and ritual. People stay when they know when to expect you, when your presence fits into their thinking, and when your role is legible over time.
Taken together, these changes force a redefinition of what “distribution” actually means.
Distribution is no longer about maximizing impressions. It is about minimizing friction. It is not about being seen once, but about being easy to find again.
Nothing has gone wrong. The rules of the game have simply changed.
Footnotes (this section)
[3] This “unbundling” framing is a synthesis of current creator-economy analysis and observed platform incentive shifts; it’s presented here as a functional model rather than a claim sourced from a single report.
A World Without Free Reach
We are living through what scholars describe as attention inequality a phenomenon where, by design, attention concentrates in fewer hands while most content remains effectively unseen.[4]
This is not because creators aren’t talented. It’s because attention itself is scarce and platforms are optimized to allocate it in ways that serve platform objectives (retention, monetization, predictability), not creator livelihoods.
The mechanics that once allowed relatively new voices to break through, especially on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, are shifting. That doesn’t mean platforms are worthless. It means they are no longer neutral fields where exposure equates with opportunity. They are curated marketplaces with incentives, gatekeepers, and economic gravity.
Footnotes (this section)
[4] On “attention inequality” as an observed structural dynamic in online environments.
The Era of Compound Attention
Once the functions of discovery, distribution, validation, and retention separate, a new reality becomes visible one that many artists can feel but struggle to articulate. The old logic no longer explains outcomes. Effort does not translate cleanly into exposure. Visibility no longer guarantees belief. And growth, when it happens at all, feels slower, quieter, and more uneven.
I’ve come to think of what follows as the era of compound.
By this, I don’t mean a trend or a tactic. I mean a shift in how attention, trust, and opportunity accumulate over time. If the last era rewarded immediacy, posts, spikes, moments, this one rewards continuity. It privileges work that can be returned to, referenced, and remembered. It favors coherence over novelty, and patience over speed.
This pattern has a long history. Sociologists have described it as cumulative advantage often associated with the “Matthew Effect,” where early recognition increases the likelihood of future recognition.[5] In other words, advantage compounds not because of talent alone, but because trust and context stack over time.
Compound works quietly. Its early stages feel like stagnation. Its middle stages feel like obscurity. Only in hindsight does it register as momentum.
Compound is slower. It is less visible. And once it takes hold, it is far more difficult to displace.
The next section looks at how this shift appears in real time, through platforms that have already completed their growth phase.
Footnotes (this section)
[5] Merton’s foundational discussion of the “Matthew Effect” in science (cumulative advantage).
When Platforms Finish Growing
Instagram and TikTok as Case Studies
Platforms do not die when they stop working for creators. They finish growing.
What most people interpret as decline is more accurately maturation. Once a platform reaches saturation, of users, content, and advertiser demand, its incentives change. Growth is no longer the primary objective. Monetization, retention, and risk management take its place. Distribution shifts accordingly.
This is the phase both Instagram and TikTok are now in.
Instagram: From Social Graph to Monetized Broadcast
Instagram did not collapse. It completed a transition. By 2024, Instagram had fully completed its transition into a paid advertising and retention-driven platform. Discovery was no longer a default function of participation, but an exception requiring leverage, spend, or prior momentum
In its early years, Instagram functioned primarily as a social graph. Content traveled through networks of familiarity: friends, peers, adjacent communities. Discovery was imperfect, but it existed. New voices surfaced through proximity and participation rather than scale.
Over time, that architecture changed. The platform quietly moved through a structural shift that explains nearly every frustration creators now experience.
Instagram has completed its transition from:
- social graph → broadcast platform
- discovery → retention
- expression → monetization
Each of these shifts altered what the system rewards. A social graph prioritizes relationships; a broadcast platform prioritizes scale. Discovery rewards emergence; retention rewards familiarity. Expression privileges experimentation; monetization privileges predictability.
In practice, this means reach concentrates among accounts that already have it. New voices rarely break through organically. Content is optimized less for creative emergence and more for keeping users scrolling in ways that support advertising and commerce.
Instagram now behaves less like a discovery engine and more like a paid media channel, a brand archive, and a credibility layer. It is no longer a reliable place to build an audience from scratch. It is a place to signal legitimacy once an audience already exists.
Visibility is increasingly rented, not earned.
TikTok: The Last Open Frontier and Why It’s Closing
TikTok felt different because, structurally, it was.
TikTok’s early power had very little to do with video itself. It came from interest-based distribution, low social cost of posting, and algorithmic curiosity. Content circulated based on behavior rather than identity. For a brief period, this created something close to a meritocratic discovery engine. Novelty mattered. Niche depth could outperform scale. New voices surfaced quickly.
That phase is ending, the end started in 2023 (footnotes below).
As the platform professionalizes, its incentives shift toward predictability: watch-time, trend alignment, commerce features, repeat performers, and higher production expectations. The center of gravity moves from discovery engine to entertainment network, from creator lottery to professionalized funnel.
This does not make TikTok irrelevant. It makes it different.
What’s Ending and What Isn’t
Across both platforms, the pattern is the same.
What’s ending is free reach, free attention, and free audience-building at scale.
What’s not ending is publishing, connection, niche authority, or depth.
The internet itself is not disappearing. It is reverting to something closer to its historical norm: patronage, membership, direct relationships, and trust-based followings.
We are moving away from a culture organized around Who can shout the loudest?
and toward one organized around Who do I choose to listen to?
That is a philosophical shift, not a technical one.
Footnotes (this section)
See footnotes ¹–⁹ for platform disclosures, earnings reports, and independent research supporting these timelines.
Why This Moment Feels So Disorienting
This moment feels uniquely disorienting not because any single system has failed, but because several structural shifts are unfolding at once and their interactions are difficult to perceive unless you’ve been working inside these systems over time as I have.
First, platforms are closing.
As social platforms mature, they narrow rather than expand. Distribution becomes more selective, incentives become clearer, and access becomes increasingly permissioned. What once felt open now feels conditional. This closure is not malicious; it is structural. Mature platforms optimize for stability, predictability, and revenue. The result is a quieter, less permeable environment especially for new or marginal voices.
Second, artificial intelligence is flooding the cultural field with content.
The volume of material now entering the internet far exceeds human capacity to meaningfully absorb it. Text, images, video, and audio can be produced at near-zero marginal cost. Scarcity no longer exists at the level of creation. As a result, attention, not content, is the binding constraint. In such conditions, novelty loses power quickly, and differentiation becomes harder to sustain without context or trust.
Third, audiences are overwhelmed.
This is the most under-discussed part of the shift. Audiences are not disengaging because they care less. They are disengaging because they are saturated. Faced with infinite choice and constant stimulation, people become more selective, more loyal, and more conservative in how they allocate attention. They retreat toward sources that feel familiar, legible, and trustworthy (see past Substacks for a deep dive into this).
Together, these forces create a strange emotional landscape. Creators feel as though they are doing everything “right,” yet outcomes no longer track effort. Posting more does not yield more clarity. Visibility feels fleeting. Feedback loops weaken.
What is often diagnosed as personal failure is, in fact, systemic compression.
Attention is no longer abundant. It is filtered. And in filtered environments, continuity outperforms novelty, trust outperforms exposure, and recognition replaces reach as the primary currency.
This is not the end of participation. It is the end of casual amplification. And that distinction matters more than it first appears.
Footnotes (this section)
“As platforms mature, openness gives way to predictability — a pattern well documented in platform economics literature.”¹–⁴
What Actually Replaces Social Media (Functionally)
Nothing replaces social media one-to-one.
That is the mistake most people make when trying to understand this moment. They look for the “next Instagram” or the “next TikTok,” assuming a single platform will once again handle everything at once. What is actually happening is quieter and more structural: unbundling.
For a brief period, social media collapsed several essential functions into a single interface. That collapse made cultural participation feel unusually simple. You showed up in one place, posted regularly, and visibility, validation, and return all appeared to follow.
That configuration no longer holds.
For much of the last decade, social media performed four jobs simultaneously. It introduced new voices, delivered work to audiences, signaled legitimacy, and kept people returning. Discovery, distribution, validation, and retention were bundled together inside a single feed. That bundling is what made the system feel powerful and deceptively stable.
Those functions have not disappeared. They have separated.
Discovery: From Algorithms to Adjacency
Discovery no longer happens primarily in feeds. It happens through proximity.
People now encounter new artists, writers, and thinkers because someone they already trust points to them, references them, or forwards their work in context. Discovery has shifted from algorithmic exposure to relational adjacency.
The sentence that defines discovery now is simple: “I found you because someone I trust mentioned you.”
This is not scale. It is graph adjacency. And while it moves more slowly, it produces stronger outcomes. Discovery through adjacency arrives pre-qualified. It carries context. It arrives with implied belief.
Distribution: From Platforms to Direct Lines
Distribution no longer means reaching strangers at scale. It means reaching the same people repeatedly without friction.
Email, text, private links, group spaces, gated channels these are not growth hacks. They are continuity systems. They make return easy. They allow work to accumulate rather than reset.
This is why newsletters work. Why podcasts work. Why memberships work. Not because they go viral, but because they persist.
Distribution has quietly changed its definition. It is no longer about how many people see your work once. It is about how easily the right people can find you again.
Distribution now equals recall plus access.
Validation: From Volume to Reputation Density
Likes and follower counts have lost explanatory power. They are inflated, noisy, and easily misread.
Validation now comes from density, not scale. Who references your work. Who returns to it. Who forwards it privately. Who stays over time.
Ten people who consistently act on your ideas matter more than ten thousand who scroll past them. Reputation accrues through behavior, not metrics.
This is why belief now feels slower to build and more durable once it exists.
Retention: From Engagement to Ritual
Retention is no longer driven by novelty or dopamine. It is driven by rhythm.
People stay when they know when to expect you, when they feel oriented inside your world, and when they understand what role you play in their thinking. Cadence matters more than frequency. Consistency matters more than intensity.
This is why studios, salons, clubs, episodic publishing, and recurring moments outperform constant posting. They create anticipation rather than demand attention.
Retention has become ritual.
What This Means, Taken Together
Social media has not been replaced. Its functions have been redistributed across systems that behave very differently from one another.
Discovery is relational.
Distribution is direct.
Validation is behavioral.
Retention is rhythmic.
The confusion many artists feel comes from continuing to use a single tool as though it still performs all four roles simultaneously. It no longer does.
Once you see this clearly, the next shift becomes legible.
We are not moving toward louder systems. We are moving toward deeper ones. And depth compounds in ways exposure never could.
Redefining Distribution in the Era of Compound Advantage
To understand why compound advantage is emerging, we need to be precise about what “distribution” now actually means.
For most of the social media era, distribution was treated as a numbers game. The goal was to maximize impressions, exploit algorithms, optimize hooks, and chase novelty. Distribution meant reaching as many strangers as possible, as quickly as possible, with the assumption that scale itself would convert into belief or opportunity.
That definition no longer holds.
As the functions of discovery, distribution, validation, and retention separate, distribution sheds its association with visibility and takes on a different role entirely. It stops being about how far something travels and becomes about how easily it can be returned to.
In the compound era, distribution is no longer about reach. It is about recall.
This shift is subtle but decisive. The most important question is no longer “How many people saw this?” It is “How easily can the right people find this again?”
If someone wants to reread your work, reference it, forward it privately, or check whether you’ve published again, how much friction stands in the way? Is your thinking accessible, legible, and stable enough to be revisited over time?
That is distribution now.
Old distribution prioritized impressions. New distribution prioritizes access. Old distribution rewarded novelty. New distribution rewards continuity. Old distribution reset every post. New distribution compounds across bodies of work.
This is why systems that feel “small” on the surface, newsletters, podcasts, studio notes, private lists, recurring releases, are quietly outperforming platforms optimized for scale. They do not promise growth. They promise return.
Distribution in the compound era does not create spikes. It creates paths.
Those paths matter because compound advantage depends on repetition with depth. Recognition forms not when someone sees you once, but when they encounter you repeatedly in coherent ways, across time, inside contexts that already carry trust.
This is also why so many creators feel as though their work is “doing well” but not going anywhere. Visibility without return does not accumulate. Exposure without access does not endure. Distribution that cannot be revisited does not compound.
What looks like stagnation is often misaligned infrastructure.
Once distribution is understood as recall plus access, the broader pattern becomes clear. Systems that privilege speed, volume, and novelty struggle to support compound advantage. Systems that privilege continuity, legibility, and trust quietly reinforce it.
This is the pivot point.
When distribution stops being about amplification and starts being about endurance, success no longer arrives as a breakout. It arrives as recognition. And recognition, by its nature, cannot be crowdsourced or automated.
It must be earned over time and carried by structures designed to last. Which happens to be my speciality and what Lion and Lamb was built for.
Artsy and 1stDibs as Case Studies
For much of the last decade, platforms like Artsy and 1stDibs occupied a powerful position in the art ecosystem. They promised something galleries and artists had historically struggled to scale on their own: discovery.
At their peak, these platforms functioned as centralized visibility engines. Artsy aggregated over a million artworks from thousands of galleries worldwide, presenting itself as a neutral, authoritative index of the contemporary market. Participation came at a cost, often hundreds of dollars per month in subscription fees, plus commissions on sales plus client “tagging”, but the tradeoff felt justified. Being “on Artsy” or “on 1stDibs” signaled legitimacy. Discovery could be outsourced. Demand, it was assumed, would follow.
For a time, this model worked.
The broader online art market expanded rapidly. By the mid-2020s, online art sales were estimated at over $12 billion annually, accounting for a meaningful share of total global art transactions. Digital platforms proved that collectors were willing to browse and buy online at scale.¹
But growth in transaction volume masked a deeper shift in behavior.
The Assumptions That No Longer Hold
Marketplaces like Artsy and 1stDibs were built on three assumptions: that supply would consistently exceed demand, that discovery could be centralized, and that buyers valued breadth more than belief. As a result, their most advanced capability lies in inventory organization. Their backend cataloging systems are highly sophisticated, optimized to index, filter, and manage scale with remarkable efficiency. It was deeply impressive for someone like me who builds systems for a living.
Those assumptions were reasonable in an era of cheaper attention and lighter saturation. Collectors browsed like shoppers. Inventory felt infinite. Platforms felt neutral. Artists were more interchangeable.
That world has quietly disappeared.
As attention fragmented and choice exploded, collectors stopped browsing expansively. They began searching narrowly. They relied more heavily on referrals, advisors, and prior familiarity. In other words, discovery shifted from platforms to people.
Marketplaces, however, remained structurally dependent on volume.
Volume Is Expensive. Trust Is Not Scalable.
This is where the economic tension becomes impossible to resolve.
Marketplaces require scale to function. Large inventories justify subscription fees. Paid traffic offsets declining organic discovery. Seller growth compensates for thinning engagement. As organic reach declined across the internet, these platforms became increasingly dependent on paid acquisition to attract buyers.
Customer acquisition costs rose. Casual browsing declined. Sellers began to question whether the fees they paid were generating genuine belief or merely maintaining visibility.
Survey data supports this unease. In a recent collector study, only 17 percent of buyers reported feeling that the art market serves them “very well,” citing lack of transparency and contextual understanding as persistent barriers.² The issue was not access to objects. It was confidence in decision-making.
Marketplaces can facilitate transactions. They cannot create trust at scale.
Trust is contextual. It accumulates through narrative, repetition, and relationship. When belief is outsourced to a platform, it weakens the artist’s own interpretive frame. Visibility that is rented does not compound. Presence without advocacy erodes confidence on both sides of the market.
What many artists and gallerists began to feel, often before they could articulate it, was exhaustion without momentum.
What These Platforms Are Becoming Instead
This does not mean marketplaces are disappearing. It means their role is narrowing.
Artsy has increasingly shifted away from discovery and toward infrastructure. It now functions primarily as an inventory backend, a price-comparison layer (how almost everyone I know now uses it) and a legitimacy signal for institutions, advisors, and collectors who already know what they are looking for.
Artists do not break through on Artsy. They are validated there after momentum exists.
1stDibs has followed a parallel but more retail-oriented path, leaning into high-end design and luxury consumption. Its challenges illustrate the same underlying issue: when trust erodes and acquisition costs rise, volume alone cannot sustain belief.
In both cases, the platform becomes a reference point rather than a launchpad.
The Lesson for Artists
The weakening of all marketplaces as discovery engines is not a rejection of digital sales. People still buy art online and they will continue to do so vigorously. According to the Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report 2025, online-only transactions now account for about 18 % of total global art sales, significantly higher than the pre-pandemic share.† This demonstrates that digital channels remain a meaningful entry point for new collectors and transactions even as the mechanisms of discovery evolve. What has changed is how buyers decide whom to trust and where they prefer to encounter work that feels legible and authoritative in context.
Collectors no longer want infinite choice. They want context, reassurance, and continuity. They want to understand why a body of work exists, how it fits into a larger arc, and who stands behind it.
Marketplaces can move objects. They cannot carry meaning.
When artists and galleries rely on platforms as substitutes for narrative, relationships, or advocacy, they often experience price compression, audience drift, and a quiet erosion of confidence in their own work. The platform extracts value without returning belief.
This is why so many artists and dealers feel visible yet stalled. The work is circulating, inventory is technically accessible, and names appear in the right places but momentum does not follow. Visibility without belief does not compound.
This tension is also what sits beneath the growing unease around art fairs. Increasingly, fairs are no longer evaluated as discovery opportunities but as risk calculations. The costs, financial, logistical, psychological, are high, and the justification for that exposure feels less certain. When discovery no longer reliably converts into trust, participation becomes harder to defend, even when the optics remain strong.
What is being questioned is not whether fairs work in a transactional sense, but whether they still perform the deeper function they once did: creating conviction, continuity, and forward motion. In an environment governed by compound attention, exposure alone is no longer enough to offset the risk.
Once marketplaces lose their role as discovery engines, a vacuum opens not a nostalgic one, but a structural one. If platforms cannot build belief, and marketplaces cannot sustain trust, something else must carry interpretation, continuity, and memory.
That “something” is not another platform. It is people.
In Closing
If nothing else, I hope this essay has made the present moment feel more legible.
The confusion and frustration many artists and creators are experiencing is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is the result of structural shifts that are rarely named plainly. Distribution has changed. Attention has changed. The pathways that once converted visibility into momentum no longer function the way they did, and pretending otherwise only compounds frustration.
Orientation matters. Not because it guarantees outcomes, but because it allows you to move deliberately rather than reactively. To choose systems that compound rather than exhaust. To build work that can be returned to, trusted, and sustained.
Thank you for reading and for spending your attention here.
Next Friday, I’ll continue this line of thinking in The Return of Human Intermediaries, where I move from diagnosis to practice. We’ll look at what actually replaces algorithmic amplification in a saturated market, and how artists can work with intermediaries, galleries, advisors, editors, managers, and cultural operators, in ways that restore context, continuity, and belief.
It will be practical. It will be specific. And it will be grounded in how the market is functioning now not how we wish it still worked.
Until then.. stay safe and stay warm!
Xoxo
Rachael