Does anyone else feel like social media algorithms have a personal problem with them?

If you are still no where near where you want to be after 3 years, then its likely because your content and its quality isn't engaging enough for users. Which sounds harsh, but it takes a specific style and balance to catch the eye of people for engagement and repeated engagement without becoming unbashedly clickbaity.

Three years across every platform is usually more of the problem than the algorithm. Each one rewards something different, so splitting the effort means none of them gets enough posts to show you what works. I'd pick the one where your audience already hangs out and look at your top 5 posts ever there. Whatever they have in common, the topic, the format, the first line, make 20 more of that and ignore the rest for a couple of months. Also worth asking someone who doesn't know you to look at your last 10 posts and tell you in one sentence what the account is about. If they can't, that's usually why people don't follow.

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Three years across multiple platforms can hide the signal because each rewards different behavior. Pick one platform and one audience problem for 30 posts, then track qualified responses: saves, meaningful comments, profile visits, and repeat commenters, not raw reach. Reuse the topic angles that earn those actions and drop formats that only produce impressions. Which platform and content theme currently gives you the highest rate of meaningful replies per 1,000 views?

After 3 years the algorithm isn't really your problem, distribution is. The platforms optimize for retention, not quality, so decent content with no existing audience loop just sits there. What usually breaks the cycle is finding one format that gets reshared outside the platform itself, group chats, forums, email forwards, because that traffic doesn't depend on the feed deciding to show you.

Yeah. My posts used to do well back when you could search hashtags and find people organically, I’d get 400 likes and 20-30 comments on Instagram on any given post and felt like I was growing and on my way to more. And it was like a community, I liked all the people I interacted with and they posted cool stuff too. But when insta stopped being its own thing and started copying Tiktok and now everything is a For You algorithm, I started to fall off. I enjoyed making videos for a little while at first, but eventually hated it and didn’t want to follow the trends. But what’s annoying is someone will post the most basic 5 second video of walking down an unmemorable boring path and it’ll get a million views, I’ll post the Himalayas or some shit and it’s like 200 views. There are people in my niche who post kind of low quality stuff (and no, it’s not made better by their personality or humor or anything), and somehow they are doing really well with lots of followers and brand deals, meanwhile I’ve been stuck at 2000 followers for years no matter what. I feel like Instagram wrote me off, it’s thinking “if she’s had this account for this long and isn’t doing better, it’s never going to happen.” I almost feel like I need to create a brand new account to get an extra push. But if I don’t post 45 identical “POV” videos with slightly different wording every time, maybe that account will fail too.

I do think some of the people in my niche have bought followers because their engagement levels are so low despite the follower count. And I know a lot of huge influencers have zero clickthroughs or traffic to their websites, they are only successful on social, meanwhile my website makes money from search traffic and social media isn’t relevant for me. So the comparison game is useless depending on your goals. But yeah sometimes I see someone’s account and I’m like, “her?” She’s the one blessed by the algo??

2000 views is actually decent for organic reach nowadays, platforms just want you to pay for ads to get anything past that

That 2,000 number is actually a good sign weirdly. That’s the algorithm giving you a test audience. It shows the post to a small batch, watches if they stop scrolling, and only pushes it further if they do. So you’re not being suppressed, you’re failing the first 2 seconds with strangers. Which usually means the hook is written for people who already know you. Try rewriting your first line like it’s for someone who has zero reason to care about you yet and see if the ceiling moves.

People might tell you it’s a content quality issue, but there’s plenty of low-quality content out there getting tons of views. When you’re creating on someone else’s platform, you don’t have control over everything. Maybe some of it just comes down to luck, too.

I started a blog and so far only a few hundred people have visited and I have 7 instagram followers I had 6 last week LMAO!! I'm told the content is engaging and interesting. Not sure how anyone does this and gets traction.