[jimhi]

I somewhat agree with the sentiment of what you wrote here, the barrier is indeed higher. But I have seen two things in my social circle that get people to take the time to look.

1. They keep doing it over a long period and on a scheduled basis. For example, putting out rap albums on SoundCloud every week for two years. You can’t help but check one out and see where all this effort is going.

2. They put it on a platform that doesn’t let you immediately judge how popular it is. It’s easy to see how many likes your medium post has, it’s hard to gauge that on your homemade blog.

[winternett]

Support on your personal blog is good, but social media is necessary in gaining outreach to new and more targeted audiences... Even blogs are subject to low visibility via search engine result rankings and competition, while they can be costly to maintain as well.

Social media platforms have large bases of users that are looking for specific content, but they are very geared towards likes and followers, and that is what ends up also being a barrier if that support is low for a creator. When individuals click like on a post, it now increases the outreach of the post to more and more viewers, making that brand of support more valuable.

It's not fair of course that visibility is mostly driven by engagement now, but simple clicks from friends helps independent creators go far beyond those limits, whereas sponsored and wealthy artists can simply pay for ads to cross the visibility barrier, and already popular creators already have "fans" to keep them visible. So many great, and even well known artists and musicians simply quit now because of this artificially generated glass ceiling that drives profit only for platforms, it's a shame.