Feed economy: How Each Platform Manufactures Dependency Loops

Hi I’m Angela 🧸A product growth marketer who exists in the space between caffeine highs and retention lows.

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How social media platforms manipulate creators

Have you ever felt that being a creator today means slowly giving up what you’re best at, what you love most?Like your voice is being reshaped, quietly and algorithmically, into something else.Something that fits. Performs. Converts.It is not just content anymore.You are producing what the platform wants you to become. And the strangest part?Most people do not even notice it is happening.

Melanie Murphy, an Irish creator with over 800,000 followers, described the hidden cost of this evolution: “There’s no off button in this job. The algorithms never stop. You can’t pause the internet because you get sick”

This is not metaphor. It is the lived reality of half of creators. A survey by advertising agency Billion Dollar Boy found that fifty percent have experienced burnout and thirty‑seven percent have thought about quitting entirely . by The Guardian

The default advice to creators today sounds like this:

“Just make great content.”

But “great” is platform-specific.

It’s defined by what the platform wants to optimize, not what your audience actually needs.

The Platform Trap

Platforms aren't neutral distribution tools. They're incentive engines with built-in behavioral defaults.

Platforms no longer simply distribute content. They now encode behavior.Every swipe, like, scroll, and pause trains a system, and in return, that system reshapes the user. What began as tools for creativity have evolved into closed systems for behavioral engineering. The implications are asymmetric. Platforms accrue compounding data and capital. Creators accumulate temporary attention and creative fatigue.

This essay unpacks how four platforms, TikTok, Substack, YouTube, and Podcasts structure dependency loops. Not through obvious rules, but through invisible defaults that steer content behavior, format design, and monetization strategy.

1. TikTok: When Viral Means Disposable

Growth feels exponential, but your leverage rounds to zero. Welcome to attention without ownership.

• TikTok mid-tier creators after the May 20 algorithm change

Many reported extreme impact after TikTok reordered its rewards:

“Revenues plunge by up to 90 percent” within hours of the update

by The Tech No Tricks

A stark illustration of how hidden algorithmic shifts can immediately redefine who or what is rewarded.

A Closed System Masquerading as a Discovery Engine

TikTok optimizes for velocity. It’s built on repetition, not relationships.From the outside, it looks like a meritocracy of short-form storytelling. In practice, it is a frictionless loop of disempowerment.

The most critical point is this: TikTok rewards behavior that aligns with its own retention goals, not the creator’s goals. That’s why outbound links are punished. That’s why engagement tools are limited. That’s why content must re-perform with each upload. There is no archive effect. No subscriber base you own. Only constant reinvention, scored by a machine.

In a bold move that’s poised to reshape the e-commerce landscape within its ecosystem, TikTok has announced plans to ban links to external e-commerce sites, notably giants like Amazon.

by DirectPayNet

Creators may go viral. But they never escape the gravity.Incentives do not reward independence. They punish it.

Strategic Implication:Creators must assume they are temporary nodes in TikTok’s system, not participants in a long-term audience relationship. Brand equity built here is extractive by default. The long-term game must happen elsewhere.

Signals to Watch: