The Social Experiment…

Is Over.

If you’ve been following me on Instagram for the past 3 years you might’ve noticed my follower count jumping to 25k then steadily dropping to 20, 15, 10, and stopping around 8k.

I had been working with a marketing company and conducting an experiment on “social proof” and the results were interesting.

According to the AI Overview on google, “Social Proof is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to follow the actions of others.”

This was the goal of the experiment: would an inflated follower count act as social proof and lead to more followers, engagement, sales, bodies at shows?

The results were a mixed bag, I did gain more followers, and it was easy to tell which people were impressed by the follower count. Musicians, artists, influencers with massive follower counts were more likely to follow back, believing we were on the same level.

Casual users of the platform, potential fans had a different reactions, some were impressed, others saw right through the facade.

My peers also had mixed reactions, some saw it as a legitimate investment, others saw it as a lie, cheat, or an attempt to game the system.

Ultimately it came down to, “everyone is doing it” or “we’re doing something awesome over here if people could just see it” and essentially all of that was true. With more eyes on what my team and I were doing we were able to secure more opportunities, expand our network, and even get paid.

However, when it came to my personal shows, music, streams, merch, it had diminishing returns. After new venues saw that my in-person draw wasn’t anywhere near my follower count, or new fans noticed they were the only ones showing up to shows, or when I realized bots wouldn’t buy shirts, it started to feel really hollow.

so this year (2025), the experiment is over, I no longer boost my engagement (notice the numbers), I’ve been actively deleting bot or inactive accounts, and I’m starting over to build up my organic followers of people who actually fuck with SHNEAKY on a REAL Level. Hence the blog and newsletter. I’m really connecting with my people this year and I have a lot of special things in store for all my SHNEAKY Visionaries…