notessamuele onelia

9,300 Likes for Quitting Instagram

The Story

In December 2025, Olivia posted a Note announcing she had stopped using Instagram professionally a year earlier. It collected 9.3K likes and 838 replies (Source 1).

Her case for quitting: “For years I was chasing growth on a platform that never felt right. The algorithm rewarded content I didn’t want to make, and I was constantly performing for people who weren’t actually buying anything. I kept telling myself I just needed to crack the code, post more consistently, try a new format. But the code kept changing, and I was exhausted. So I stopped, and I redirected all that energy into building something I actually owned” (Source 1).

The ecosystem she replaced Instagram with had each platform doing a specific job, not all of them doing the same job:

  • “Substack is my home base where I publish weekly and build a direct relationship with readers who actually want to hear from me.”
  • “LinkedIn is my discovery channel where I share ideas that bring new people into my world.”
  • “Pinterest drives quiet, steady traffic to my posts without requiring me to show up every day” (Source 1).

The reframe she named explicitly: “The shift that changed everything was thinking in systems instead of followers. Each platform has a job, and together they compound in ways that chasing one big audience never did” (Source 1).

Her unhedged version of the trade: “None of these platforms ask me to dance, point at text, or film my morning routine. None of them punish me for taking a week off. And most importantly, my newsletter list is mine. If any of these platforms disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have a business” (Source 1).

The outcome she reported a year later: “Quitting Instagram felt like giving up at the time. A year later, I have more subscribers, more revenue, and more energy than I ever did when I was posting Stories every day” (Source 1).

The Make Writing Your Job interview frames the broader pattern she’s applied across platforms: she also walked away from Upwork after early experiments, “completely walk[ing] away from those kinds of platforms. The quality of work and the value they place on freelancers just wasn’t there” (Source 2).

Her own essay underlines the asymmetry of building somewhere you don’t own: when one writer’s Instagram-driven recommendations stopped flowing into Petal + Hearth, “the subscribers slowed to a trickle. Then to nothing… I had built my entire strategy on someone else’s momentum” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

Quitting a platform that’s “working” is one of the most counterintuitive moves a creator can make, which is exactly why almost no one does it. Olivia’s version of the decision is useful because it isn’t a complaint about Instagram — it’s a re-allocation. The same energy went into platforms she’d chosen for the job they could do (owned distribution on Substack, professional discovery on LinkedIn, long-tail search on Pinterest), and the result was a system where no single platform could take her business down with it. The lesson generalizes past Instagram: any platform that requires constant performance to maintain visibility is renting you your audience, not selling it to you. If your business model depends on that platform staying generous, you don’t have a business — you have a tenancy.

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