“Nobody Should Be a “Content Creator”
22nd February 2026
Tell that to OnlyFans.
As part of my job, I have to keep up with the social media space and I’m worried, bored and annoyed in equal measures. There is not much social about it any longer. Instead it’s become a race to the bottom of lowest common denominator content. And interaction bait. Or rage bait. Or just obvious spam disguised in seemingly sophisticated sound bites generated by AI. I never thought I would miss listicles and “50 things you didn’t know about X – number 16 will surprise you” posts, but these at least were obvious.
The problem is that social media has become a game of numbers much like SEO used to be. Posting because you learned something, found something interesting or created something has given way to feeding the machine for more clicks and interactions. The reason is monetisation. The rules of the platforms discourage creativity and authenticity and prefer short-lived bursts of emotion. Keep the noise flowing, signals are not in fashion any longer.
When I had some highly successful posts on Facebook, I automatically got “promoted” to “digital creator” which is such a generic term, it makes me want to stop altogether.
I don’t want to be a “digital creator”. I also don’t want to be a “content creator”. Either sound to me like you should create anything to fill up the platform. It’s stacking digital shelves with empty boxes, not creation. And it’s about deception. Take the following examples that should be punished and removed by Facebook but despite reporting them over and over again, you keep seeing them.
The advantage of ‘content creator’ is that it’s an anodyne term that sounds as if it tells you something without being at all specific about what that thing might be. It hides the role of the paid vagina on OnlyFans as well as the ‘influencer’ whose only ‘content’ is make-up videos or sponsored shopping expeditions. It would be like me descibing myself, during my data-warehouse-developer days, as a ‘writer’.