Who Did You Make That For?

Who did you make that for? Yourself? Or the algorithm?

Remember when social media felt quiet, Instagram especially. When it was actually about photos, not whatever weird thing the feed is pushing today to drive audience capture. You’d throw up a shot, maybe a few friends saw it, maybe nobody did. Didn’t matter. Even before social media, maybe you took photos for the fun of it. You made it for you.

Now it’s different. The feed is noise. The game isn’t about photos anymore, it’s about performance. Engagement. Monetisation. Call it whatever you want, it all means the same thing, your work is fed into a machine that doesn’t care about you.

And here’s the problem: that machine doesn’t just control who sees your work, it creeps into the way you make it. Out in the street, hiking through a field, shooting a landscape, or even just taking photos of your mates, you catch yourself thinking: will this shot land? Will it get likes? Suddenly the frame isn’t yours anymore. You’re shooting for the synthetic overlord.

Frequency over quality. Clickable over honest. Safe over personal. That’s how the algorithm wins.

And it’s draining. What used to centre you starts to feel like a job you never asked for. Numbers replacing meaning.

But here’s the reminder I keep coming back to: the algorithm doesn’t give a damn. Never has. Never will. People do. Real people. The ones who stumble across your photos and stop for a second. The ones who feel something. That’s the point.

So maybe the better question isn’t Who did you make that for?

It’s Why are you still making it?

If the answer is still for me, then you’re fine. Because even if nobody sees it, you’ll still end the day knowing you made something. That’s yours.

And that’s enough.