Why Instagram Doesn’t Reward Effort Anymore

Instagram is changing what “good” looks like, and it’s not the kind of change you can fix with a new lens or cleaner color. If you keep posting work that looks polished and still get silence, this video lays out a reason that’s hard to ignore.

Coming to you from Chrystopher Rhodes, this blunt video starts with a post from Instagram Head Adam Mosseri about where Instagram is headed and how AI has warped what people trust online. Rhodes zeroes in on one line about “trust” and “authenticity,” then builds a bigger point around it without turning it into a motivational speech. He describes the current feed as a place where you can find anything, instantly, which makes it easier to doubt everything, instantly. That’s the setup for his main question: why do simple, imperfect posts often outperform carefully produced work that took forever. He doesn’t answer it with platform tricks, and he doesn’t tell you to chase trends.

Rhodes rewinds to 2016 and talks about what used to separate creators: not just talent, but access and know-how. He says quality was scarce then, tutorials were scarce, and if you could make something look cinematic at all, you stood out fast. He gives a concrete example that will sound familiar if you were building kits back then: a Panasonic Lumix GH4 on a DJI Ronin-M plus a few effects in Premiere Pro felt like a cheat code. He links that era to why behind-the-scenes videos and technique breakdowns used to pull big attention, since fewer people could replicate the look. He frames it as a market gap that closed, not a golden age that needs to come back. If you learned your craft through that wave of tutorials, you’ll recognize what he’s describing in your own feed habits.

Then he gets to the part that stings: once everyone has the basics, “good-looking” becomes the baseline, and the baseline stops earning a reaction. He points to patterns you’ve watched get normalized, like the drone shot going from “how did they do that” to “nice,” or 120 fps slow motion going from a flex to something that can feel sleepy. Gimbal movement used to announce effort, and now it can read like default mode, even when it’s executed well. He adds AI into that pile, not as a moral panic, but as another reason perfection is easy to generate and easy to scroll past. He says the internet is in an “everything looks amazing” era, and he includes the iPhone as proof that the floor is high even before you open an editor. When the floor is high, people start hunting for signals that a real person is on the other side of the screen.

Rhodes argues that the signal people respond to is imperfection with a pulse, not low effort and not sloppy work. He talks about making a vulnerable video about being addicted to work and short on time for family, and how uncomfortable it felt to put that online. The point isn’t that confession gets views, it’s that honesty changes how your audience reads you. He phrases it as “Quality got me my audience. Humility kept it,” which lands like a warning if you’re stuck polishing the life out of every post. He also calls out a common habit: re-recording a clip nine times, then realizing the first take felt most like you, which is exactly the kind of tiny decision that can strip a voice out of your work. He keeps circling back to the same tension: when everyone can make something look perfect, the risk is that your work starts to feel like a mask even when you’re proud of it. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Rhodes.