The CEO of Patreon @jackconte recently pointed out that we're seeing the death of the follower. I took note of this because I remember @nateliason saying the same exact thing at a dinner months ago.
The algorithmic ranking concept that Facebook started in the early 2010s has recently been perfected by TikTok (and now all other platforms mimicking it).
This trend changes the economics of creator businesses. It increases the value of deep connection around sophisticated topics, as the profit of mass-appeal gets competed down by everyone aping into the same trends. If you simply don't do that, and you go a completely different, independent way, you'll stand out as particularly interesting to the most sophisticated people.
Not because the tech is incentivizing this approach, but precisely because it's incentivizing everyone else in the other direction.
At the limit, you wouldn't even need to gain followers at all; you would just produce highly valuable pieces of work, they'd be routed to their audience, and you'd be able to sell whatever just as a direct function of how good you are at creating content on any given day.
Multiple speakers at Startup School made the same very interesting point. If you start a startup now to do something that barely works with AI, the next models will make it really work.