u/Personal_Survey_2579

Genuinely asking because I've seen completely opposite experiences from people.

Some creators say reach improved after January. Content that used to get suppressed is now performing fine.

Others say it's gotten worse. More bans. More flags. Less transparency than before.

I'm in Texas, and my experience has been noticeably worse since February, but I don't know if that's because of the ownership change or just the algorithm doing what it always does.

Has anything actually changed for you since the US deal closed in January, or does it feel exactly the same?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

Because the effort is clearly there.

People are posting consistently.

Learning editing.

Studying the algorithm.

Doing everything they are supposed to do.

And still nothing.

After watching a lot of creators, including myself, I think the real problem is this:

They are building an audience without building trust.

Followers come from good content.

Money comes from people who trust you enough to buy from you, click your link, or take your recommendation seriously.

You can have 50,000 followers and zero trust.

And zero trust means zero income no matter how good your content gets.

The accounts making real money are not always the biggest ones.

They are the ones where the audience feels a genuine connection to the person behind the page.

That only comes from consistency of personality, not just consistency of posting.

What do you think is the real thing stopping most creators from actually monetizing?

Three people in my creator group had their accounts disabled in the last 30 days.

All three were at a point where growth was accelerating. Monetization was starting to work. Brand deals were coming in.

Not small accounts. Not new accounts. Combined following of almost 400,000.

No warnings. No strikes. No policy violations they could identify.

Just disabled overnight right at the moment things were finally working.

Maybe it is coincidence. But it is happening too consistently to ignore.

Accounts that are figuring out the game and not spending money on ads seem to be the ones getting hit hardest.

Is anyone else noticing a pattern with which accounts are getting disabled or is this just bad luck across the board?

I’m honestly still confused about this.

My account had around 26k followers. Mostly travel + food content. Nothing political, nothing controversial, no repost spam.

I’ve been posting on that account consistently since 2024.

Last week I went to sleep normally and woke up logged out.

Tried signing back in and got hit with:

“Your account has been permanently banned due to multiple Community Guidelines violations.”

Multiple violations??

I had maybe 2 removed videos total in 2 years.

What makes this worse is TikTok never showed me which videos supposedly caused the ban. No detailed explanation. Just generic automated messages.

I appealed within like 30 minutes.

Got an email saying they’d review it in 24 to 48 hours.

It’s now been 6 days.

I submitted another appeal and got almost the exact same copy paste response again.

At this point I genuinely can’t tell if a real person ever even looked at the account.

What scares me most is the account still had videos getting views literally hours before the ban happened. Nothing looked unusual.

Has anyone here actually recovered a permanently banned account recently?

Not looking for generic “just appeal” advice. I want to hear from people who genuinely got their account back and what actually worked.

This is the part of TikTok that messes with my head the most. I can post a video that blows up overnight, then upload something with the same style and quality the next day and it gets absolutely nothing. No warning, no explanation, just dead reach. Makes it hard to tell whether growth on TikTok is actually strategy or just randomness mixed with timing. Do bigger creators deal with this too or mostly smaller accounts?

Feels like a lot of creators delay uploads forever because they keep trying to perfect every detail before posting on YouTube. Better edits, better thumbnails, better scripting, and somehow the video still never feels ready enough. Do you think YouTube has created unrealistic pressure around perfection, or is high competition forcing creators to over polish everything just to survive now?

For me it was when my account got restricted for absolutely no reason and I realized I had no backup. No email list. No other platform. Nothing.

Three years of work sitting on a platform I had zero control over.

That moment changed how I approach everything. Instagram is now just the top of my funnel. I use it to drive people somewhere I actually own.

But I wasted years treating it like the whole business. Optimizing follower count. Chasing reach. Building on someone else's land.

Curious when that shift happened for others here.

Was there a specific moment that made you realize you needed to own your audience somewhere else?

Spending enough time on TikTok can make it seem like everyone is growing fast, making money, and gaining followers constantly, but I’m starting to think the platform only highlights a small percentage of creators while the majority stay mostly unseen. Because people usually post their wins instead of struggles, it creates this illusion that success is happening everywhere all the time. Makes me wonder if TikTok unintentionally sets unrealistic expectations for creators who are just starting out or growing slowly.

Two years ago I could post a solid reel and hit 50,000 views organically. Same niche. Same effort. Same content quality.

Today that same post gets 1,200 views unless I boost it.

The moment I put money behind it 40,000 views overnight. Same post. Same caption. Same everything.

This isn't an algorithm problem. This is a deliberate business decision. They are literally throttling organic reach to force creators into paying for visibility.

And the most frustrating part is how normalized it has become. Creators just quietly start boosting posts and tell themselves it's part of the game now.

It is not part of the game. It's the platform changing the rules after you already built something on it.

Has anyone else completely stopped organic posting because paid is the only thing that moves the needle now?

I'll be honest. I clicked agree too.

There was a pop up. I was half asleep. I tapped through it.

Didn't think anything of it.

Then a few weeks later someone in my feed started breaking down what the new terms actually said and I went back and read the whole thing properly for the first time.

The new policy now allows TikTok to collect precise GPS level location data from your phone with your permission which technically you gave when you tapped agree.

It also expanded their off platform advertising network, meaning TikTok can now follow you around the internet with ads even when you're not using the app.

And the part that actually bothered me most

TikTok's own inclusion guide says they don't collect certain personal information. But their actual privacy policy says they can infer details about you including age, gender and interests from your behaviour and use it.

Two different documents saying two different things.

I'm not saying delete the app. I use it every day still.

But I think a lot of people have no idea what they agreed to in January because the pop up looked like every other update notification and we've been trained to just tap through them.

Go back and actually read it if you haven't.

Not trying to be dramatic. Just think people deserve to know what's running on their phone.

Did anyone actually read the new terms before agreeing?

After scrolling TikTok for a while, it starts feeling like a lot of creators are using the exact same pacing, hooks, captions, editing styles, and even opinions because they know those formats perform well. The platform still has creativity, but sometimes it feels like originality gets replaced by whatever formula currently works with the algorithm. It creates this strange situation where standing out becomes harder even though millions of people are posting every day. Curious if others think TikTok is making content feel more repetitive over time.

People online love saying:

“Just stay consistent.”

So I did.

4 months.

No breaks.

No missed days.

And almost nothing happened.

My followers barely moved.

Reach stayed weak.

Most posts died within hours.

I kept telling myself consistency would eventually pay off.

But eventually I had to admit something uncomfortable:

I wasn’t being consistent.

I was being consistently average.

So I stopped posting for a week and started studying creators in my niche that were actually growing.

Not copying them.

Just paying attention.

And I noticed every strong post had the same pattern:

It made people feel understood.

It gave them something worth sending.

It said something people already felt but couldn’t explain themselves.

Meanwhile my posts were technically “fine” but emotionally empty.

I was posting to stay active.

They were posting to make people react.

That difference changed everything.

I came back and posted once that week.

That single post outperformed almost my entire previous month combined.

That’s when I understood:

Posting every day without intention isn’t discipline.

It’s noise.

One strong post people care about will always beat seven forgettable ones.

Consistency matters.

But only after the content itself is worth remembering.

Turns out my content just wasn’t worth sharing.

I blamed everything at first.

Hashtags. Posting times. Shadowbans. “Instagram hates small creators.”

So I tested it.

Two accounts. Same niche. Same amount of effort.

One used 30 hashtags on every post.

The other used none. Just clear captions with strong keywords.

The no-hashtag account consistently performed better.

More reach. More saves. More shares.

That’s when I realized the real problem wasn’t discoverability.

It was the content itself.

I started asking myself three uncomfortable questions before posting anything:

Would someone actually send this to a friend?

Does this make people feel something?

Would anyone care enough to screenshot or save it?

Most of my posts failed all three.

They weren’t bad.

They were just forgettable.

That changed everything for me.

I stopped trying to “beat the algorithm” and started focusing on making posts people genuinely wanted to share.

Growth got slower at first because I spent more time thinking.

But eventually the saves increased.

Then the shares.

Then the reach followed naturally.

Nobody really talks about this because there’s no shortcut in it.

A lot of creators want growth hacks.

Very few want to hear that the real answer is making better content.

What was the thing that actually unlocked growth for you?

TikTok used to feel more casual and creative, but now it almost feels like every creator is competing for attention nonstop. People compare views, followers, engagement, sponsorships, and growth constantly, which makes the platform feel more stressful than fun sometimes. Even watching content can feel different because you start noticing strategies and optimization everywhere instead of just creativity. Makes me wonder if TikTok naturally evolved this way or if the algorithm itself pushed creators into treating everything like a competition.

This sounds backwards, but I feel like my Instagram reach actually got worse after I became more consistent. Earlier I posted randomly and some content would perform surprisingly well, but now that I’m posting regularly and trying to improve quality, engagement feels flatter.

I’m starting to wonder if posting too often hurts performance somehow or if the algorithm just reacts differently over time.

Has anyone else experienced this after becoming more active on Instagram, or am I reading too much into it?