If you have the follower count, why not make an extra few bucks on the side? In fact, why wouldn’t you want to collect followers? Well, I was one of those people that walked away from the attention, money, and 10,000+ followers each on Tumblr and Youtube.

When I first started on social media, it was so exciting to see my content get popular and watch the numbers grow. From getting my first offers to promote as an influencer to deals for affiliate marketing, it was an exciting journey. But with these growing numbers and offers brought on a lot of problems that in the end I couldn’t be bothered to handle.

Deal or no deal.

Photo by Ondrej Supitar via StockSnap

Nowadays 10,000 followers is the minimum for getting sponsors and similar offers, but it was quite a big deal a few years back.

One of the first offers I had was to promote some accessories as an affiliate marketer. I accepted because it was a brand I believed in and I was more than happy to promote their products. And, with that offer, I thought, “Wow, this is super cool. I could do more of these!”

As a high school student about to head off to college, funds were low, so this was a great opportunity.

But down the line, I received some offers from companies I had never heard of. Upon research, one such company had a crazy (and I mean crazy) amount of bad reviews with people screaming “scam!” There was this question of ethics that I’m sure other influencers have also faced: “One post about this product and I can get $500?? How easy is that?” The offer was really tempting, and if you were like me in high school making $7.25/hr working part-time at McDonalds, this sounded like the end of the rainbow. In the end, I didn’t promote that specific company’s product because it didn’t feel right to promote an obvious scam to users who trusted what I had to say.

#Triggered.

Photo by Lauren Peng via Unsplash

If you were wondering, I gained a lot of followers on different platforms from posting original content that I was interested in (such as life in Japan). The account with the biggest amount of followers, Tumblr, got popular from my original pictures that I would post. I got new followers from the use of relevant hashtags.

Did you know there is actually an extension for Tumblr hashtags?

The extension is called Tumblr Savior and it can block certain tags from your dashboard. One day, as I was scheduling in a few posts on Tumblr, I got an anonymous message about one of my pictures. Seeing the notification, I got excited. At that point, my follower count was growing and a lot of the messages were so nice and encouraging. But this message was different. “Would you please tag your food photos? It triggers me.”

Uhhhhh?

I said I wouldn’t do it and that they were free to unfollow me. The response? Many “triggered” individuals called me “problematic” and anonymous messages called me other names; there was a string of unfollows — typical internet mob things. As someone who knows people with more serious triggers, it’s hard to see food as a trigger since it’s a bit unavoidable…even offline.

As a result, I was a bit turned off to sharing anything on social media, especially Tumblr and Facebook. I wanted to avoid social media arguments. I felt like everything and anything could be triggering to anyone.

And, I felt bad. You don’t know everyone’s story and their reasonings, but at the same time it’s a turn-off and very frustrating because usually it’s a public comment (public shaming) and doesn’t tell me how to help other than to not post. Sometimes a vicious mob ensues and people are so quick to just tear each other down.

The final straw.

Photo by Trinity Kubassek via StockSnap

I was fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, to have a lot of attention on my content and a lot of people would repost and reblog my content. Yeah, it was fun to see my work reblogged on Tumblr, but not when I happened to check the source blog and it wasn’t my own.

People stole my content all the time on Tumblr, even going as far as to edit out my name on my photos. Some people would even argue with me, saying that it was their content. Some people want quick-to-get followers because they want to become influencers and get sponsors to the the point where they are willing to steal other people’s content for their own.

Though I understand the sentiment of wanting to grow your account, I also take issue with people seeing their followers as just a number — a number to sell to. To me, they’re friends you don’t really know, but whom you know appreciate your work — I mean they followed you for a reason right? I answered questions and had conversations with people; people would leave nice comments. It was awesome. So to me, these were anonymous friends and not just fans or followers.

In the end, it was from my arguments with the unsavory types of people that made me so…tired of everything.

Social media was becoming more and more hostile. At first, I was really angry, and wanted to argue back and make a point. But then I grew tired (and apathetic), at which point, I realized I could just walk away; the numbers might make me seem more important than working at McDonald’s, but it was never my main job. I can drop this, I thought.

From time to time, I log in to my old accounts and I see messages from people asking where I am or saying that they miss me. To be honest, I miss posting content on my own accounts. I miss all the friends I was able to meet and talk to. Though I have had the wonderful opportunity to use my social media experience in my work and get to work with social media, I find it difficult to go back to all my personal accounts.