u/SeniorFish1754

It's not just followers.

It's two years of content. Algorithm learning your niche. Audience that trusted you. Collaborations. Brand deals. Comments from people who actually cared.

You can't just "start over."

Starting over means rebuilding all of that while the algorithm treats you like a brand new account with zero credibility.

"Just make a new one" is the most tone-deaf advice in this sub and it gets repeated constantly.

Asking about consulting firms at the $2M revenue stage. Most marketing for advisory is built for fortune 500 budgets or sub $500k solo operations, the middle band where my business sits feels weirdly underserved. Anyone here use a consulting firm, business advisor, or fractional cfo at this revenue level and find it useful?

Wondering whether to go with a business advisor who looks at the whole company, a fractional cfo who only touches the financial side, or eos as a system the team adopts. Don't want to spend in the wrong direction.

For context, digital products business mostly through our own store with a couple of marketplaces on top, six employees, revenue is up but profit is stuck and I cant isolate whether its acquisition cost, pricing, or me being in the way of everything.

Last year my YouTube channel averaged around $4.80 RPM on long videos, but recently it dropped closer to $2.10 even though views are actually higher now. Most of my audience is still from the US and UK, so I expected revenue to stay stable at least. Curious if other creators are seeing RPM drops lately too or if something specific changed with my content category or audience behavior?

Sometimes it feels like creators blame the YouTube algorithm for everything when a video underperforms, even though viewers might’ve just not connected with the content itself. At the same time, the platform clearly controls a huge part of visibility too. Do you think most creators rely too heavily on algorithm explanations instead of improving content, or is the system genuinely unpredictable enough to deserve the blame it gets?

Hit a plateau that made no sense for seven weeks. Tracking consistently, same foods, same deficit on paper. Nothing was moving.

Finally started weighing everything again instead of eyeballing portions I'd "gotten good at." My tablespoon of peanut butter was two tablespoons. My pasta serving was 40% over. Cooking oil I was "just drizzling" was three tablespoons. Added up to about 400 calories a day I wasn't accounting for.

Started weighing again and lost 1.8 pounds the first week of doing nothing else different. Portion creep is so gradual you genuinely don't notice it happening.

It feels like a lot of creators slowly stop saying what they actually think because they’re worried about losing views, upsetting audiences, or hurting channel growth. Over time content starts feeling safer and more calculated. Do you think YouTube pressures creators into hiding parts of their real personality, or is filtering yourself just necessary once a channel becomes bigger?

I’m starting to wonder how much organic growth on Instagram is actually left for smaller creators. You can spend hours making solid content, stay consistent, follow trends, and still struggle to reach new people unless a post randomly takes off. Meanwhile boosted posts and ads seem pushed everywhere now. I’m not against paid promotion, but it feels different from how Instagram used to work. Do you think creators can still grow reliably without spending money on Instagram, or is organic reach getting weaker every year?

It feels like no matter how much a creator grows on YouTube, the goals just keep moving higher. First it’s 1k subscribers, then 100k, then millions of views, and somehow it still never feels enough. Do you think YouTube conditions creators to constantly chase bigger numbers forever, or can people actually stay satisfied once they reach the success they originally wanted?

I keep hearing that posting daily on Instagram is the key to growth, but honestly I’m starting to question it. A lot of creators seem burned out trying to keep up with constant uploads, and the results don’t always look better than people posting a few strong pieces each week. Sometimes daily content even starts feeling repetitive after a point. For people who’ve tested both approaches, did posting every day genuinely help your Instagram growth, or did focusing more on quality work better in the long run?

TikTok used to feel more spontaneous and entertaining, but now it seems like almost every creator is eventually trying to sell a course, promote a product, push affiliate links, or build some kind of personal brand. I understand people wanting to make money from their audience, but sometimes it makes the platform feel less genuine than before. Even normal content can start feeling like the setup for a future promotion. Curious if others feel TikTok has become way more business focused over the last few years.

Serious question for creators here. If your next 50 uploads on YouTube completely flopped with low views and no growth, would you still keep going or eventually give up? At what point does consistency stop being dedication and start becoming wasted effort? Curious how people honestly look at motivation when results just don’t come for a long time

Like I woke up Friday and every single video had "And Emily… that's all" or a Miranda Priestly voiceover. No warning. No build-up. TikTok just collectively decided we're all fashion girls now. Is this the biggest cultural takeover of 2026 so far or are we forgetting something bigger? Drop your FYP proof in the comments

One of the most consistent things I see in finance communities is people assuming that being affected by a settlement means a check shows up automatically. It almost never works that way. The capital one data breach in 2019 exposed over 100 million accounts. The $190 million settlement fund required eligible people to actively file a claim to receive anything. The people who never filed got nothing even though they were technically in the class.The same pattern is playing out right now with several open cases. The visa, mastercard and discover settlement covers illinois residents who used non-rewards credit cards at major retailers between January 2016 and June 2022. The amazon alexa lawsuit is open for anyone who owned or registered an alexa device after june 2014. The apple icloud case covers anyone who purchased icloud storage in the past four years.

In all of these, being eligible doesn't trigger payment. you have to file. The settlement fund closes after the deadline whether or not you collected your share.

If your entire YouTube channel disappeared tomorrow and you had to start again with no audience, no connections, and no algorithm history, what would you do differently? Would you still pick the same niche and content style or completely change your approach? Curious how many creators actually believe their growth came from strategy versus being in the right place at the right time

Curious what's working for people automating str operations. I've got a portfolio that's grown past the point where I can manually handle everything, currently doing guest messages, cleaning coordination, review responses, and pricing updates across multiple channels. Have basic stuff in place but everything feels stitched together with rubber bands.

Specifically interested in automations that have actually paid off vs the ones that sounded good but ended up creating more work than they saved. Anyone here running automation systems for short term rental property management at scale?

Something I've been digging into that I think is undermodeled in most enterprise AI security postures. The data transmission footprint of AI code review tools. Most of these tools follow the same LLM inference architecture. Every time a developer asks for a suggestion or a review, the tool assembles relevant source files, transmits them to an inference endpoint, and returns a result. This happens for every single interaction. At a company with 500 developers each making 80 to 100 AI-assisted interactions per day you're looking at somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 daily outbound transmissions of raw source code. Each one is a potential interception point, a DLP event that most organizations aren't logging, and the aggregate data-in-motion is enormous.

The architecture that avoids this is a persistent context layer that lives inside your perimeter. The tool indexes your codebase once within your infrastructure and subsequent AI code review requests reference derived context rather than re-transmitting raw source each time. Data-in-motion per request drops significantly and what does leave is abstracted patterns rather than literal source. I've seen this framed purely as a cost optimization but the security implications for AI code review are at least as significant. Has anyone done formal DLP mapping against AI code review tool traffic or run packet inspection on what these tools are actually sending?

I still spend time adding tags on YouTube, but honestly not sure if they matter anymore. Some people say they’re useless now, others still treat them like a ranking factor. For those who’ve tested this properly, have you seen any noticeable difference with or without tags? Or is it better to focus all effort on title, thumbnail, and retention instead

Getting profile visits on Instagram feels like progress, but when those visits don’t turn into followers, it’s hard to understand what’s going wrong. The content might be decent, and people are clearly interested enough to click, but something stops them from following. It could be the bio, content clarity, or overall positioning. Curious what usually makes the biggest difference in turning profile visits into actual followers.