the obsession with having a niche is making everyone less interesting

on the pressure to be legible, the self that gets edited out, and what we lose when we flatten ourselves into content

The first question is always the same.

What is your niche? What are you known for?

What is the one thing, the hook, the angle, the clearly communicable value proposition, that makes you immediately legible to an algorithm, a brand partnership, a new follower who has arrived on your profile and has approximately 4 seconds to decide whether to stay?

The question arrives early, is asked constantly, and is treated as so foundational to the project of existing online that most people answer it without stopping to examine whether it is a question worth answering at all.

It is not a neutral question. It is a market question, dressed up as a creative one. It is a question that serves brands and algorithms and platform engagement metrics before it serves the person being asked to answer it. And the answer it demands, the clean, coherent, consistently deliverable self, is one that requires the systematic removal of everything complicated, contradictory, or inconvenient about being a human being.

The pressure to niche down is the pressure to be legible. And legibility, it turns out, is the enemy of depth.

The creator economy reached a $250 billion global market in 2025. It is producing more content than any previous era in human history, delivered by more people to more audiences with more consistency than was previously imaginable.

It is also producing, as a quiet side effect of all this volume and all this optimisation, a generation of people who are considerably less interesting than they would have been if they had never been asked to have a niche at all.

What follows is an argument that the niche, as currently understood and demanded, is not a creative tool. It is a cage. A well-designed, commercially incentivised, very comfortable cage, but a cage nonetheless. And the self that gets built inside it is smaller than the one that existed before.

what the algorithm actually wants from you

The niche is not a creative invention. It is an algorithmic requirement that has been repackaged as career advice.

Every major platform operates on the same fundamental logic: the more consistently a creator posts within a defined category, the more clearly the algorithm can categorise their content, the more effectively it can match that content to an audience that has previously engaged with similar material, the more reliable the engagement metrics become, and the more attractive the creator becomes to the brands that pay to reach that audience.

The niche exists because the algorithm needs to know what box to put you in. Pick your box. Stay in your box. Build your brand inside your box. The box is the product.

This has been repackaged, with considerable marketing skill, as authenticity. Find your niche, the content creation guides tell you, and your audience will trust you as an authority. Stay consistent, and your followers will know what to expect. Build your personal brand around your unique hook. The language of authentic selfhood, finding yourself, knowing your values, understanding what makes you different, has been grafted onto what is, at its structural base, a demand to make yourself easier to categorise and therefore easier to monetise.

The algorithm does not want you to find yourself. It wants you to find a keyword.

The evidence is in how the advice gets operationalised. The content creation guides, the influencer marketing playbooks, the personal branding consultants who charge significant sums to help people become more legible, all of them converge on the same instruction: narrow. Specialise. Focus.

When people think of your niche, they should think of you. This is presented as the path to authenticity. It is, more precisely, the path to reliability of output, which is what platforms and brands actually need from creators, and which has almost nothing to do with authenticity in any meaningful sense.

The $250 billion creator economy is not built on interesting people. It is built on consistent people. The two things are frequently confused because consistency can look, from the outside, like a strong identity. It is not. It is a production schedule.

the self that gets edited out

Here is what the niche demands, specifically: that you identify the parts of yourself that perform well, that generate engagement, attract the right audience, convert attention into following, and amplify them. And that you identify the parts of yourself that do not perform, that confuse the algorithm, alienate the audience, muddy the brand, and remove them.

This is not a metaphor. This is the actual, literal advice given by every personal branding resource currently in circulation. Consistency builds trust, they say. Your audience needs to know what to expect. Jumping on every viral trend can dilute your brand identity. Stay in your lane. Know your niche. Post within it. Do not deviate.

The self that survives this process is not your self. It is the edited version of your self, the one that has been passed through the filter of what performs and stripped of everything that does not. And the parts that get stripped out are, almost always, the most interesting parts. The parts that do not fit neatly into a category. The contradictions. The obsessions that do not align with the brand. The opinions that might cost followers. The genuine complexity of being a person who contains more than one coherent thing.

Human beings are not consistent. This is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the condition of being alive and thinking and changing over time.

The person who is fascinated by economics and also by the history of perfume and also by how cities are designed and also by the specific quality of light in October is not a person with a brand problem. They are a person with an interior life.

The niche demands that they choose one of these things and build their public self entirely around it, posting 3-5 times a week from within its narrow walls, being known for it, being expected to deliver it consistently, and suppressing every other part of themselves that does not contribute to the project.

The result, at scale, is a creator landscape populated by people who are remarkably coherent and remarkably boring. Everyone knows what they are going to get. Nobody is surprised. The surprise has been optimised out. And surprise, genuine, unplanned, not-on-brand surprise, is where the most interesting things in creative work tend to live.

the legibility tax

There is a specific cost to being legible that nobody in the personal branding industry wants to discuss, because the personal branding industry profits from legibility and has no commercial interest in questioning it.

The legibility tax is paid in complexity. Every time you simplify yourself to fit a niche, you are making a transaction: accessibility in exchange for depth. The more accessible you make your self, the cleaner the hook, the clearer the category, the more reliably you deliver the expected thing, the less of the actual you there is to access. The simplified version travels better. It accumulates followers faster. It attracts brand deals more efficiently. It is, by the metrics the creator economy has decided to measure, more successful. And it is, by almost any other measure, less interesting.

The people whose work has mattered, whose writing or art or thinking has genuinely changed how people understood themselves or the world, have almost universally resisted the pressure to be legible in this way. They were, by the standards of current niche advice, doing everything wrong. They were inconsistent. They changed direction. They pursued obsessions that did not fit their established identity. They refused to be known for one thing because they were not, in fact, only one thing. The work that came from that refusal was richer for it.

The internet has made it possible for an enormous number of people to build audiences for their work. This is genuinely valuable. But it has attached to that possibility a set of conditions, the niche, the brand, the consistent output, the optimised identity, that systematically disadvantage the kind of work that is most worth paying attention to. The algorithm rewards the person who posts the same thing 12 times a week in the same format with the same aesthetic, because consistency is what the algorithm can measure and therefore what it elevates. It has no instrument for depth. It has no metric for being genuinely surprised by someone.

The creator economy has produced a measurement problem disguised as a creative one. It is measuring what it can measure, engagement, reach, consistency of output, and calling the things that score well interesting. They are not, in any meaningful sense, interesting. They are optimised. The distinction matters, and we have been trained not to make it.

what gets lost when everyone has a niche

The thing that made the writers and artists and thinkers who shaped culture interesting was not their niche. It was their range.

Susan Sontag wrote about photography and illness and war and film and the nature of suffering. James Baldwin wrote about race and sexuality and religion and the American dream and what it cost to love people who could not yet love themselves. The writers who built the personal essay as a form, who created the very tradition that Substack is currently commercialising, were interesting precisely because they refused to stay in one lane. They followed the thought wherever it went. They trusted the reader to come with them. They did not ask themselves whether this essay would confuse their audience or muddy their brand. They asked whether it was true.

The pressure to niche down is incompatible with this kind of intellectual restlessness. It is incompatible with following a thought past the edge of your established territory. It is incompatible with being changed by things, with reading something that shifts your position, with having an experience that reorients your entire frame, with becoming a different version of yourself than the one your audience signed up for, because becoming a different version of yourself is, in niche logic, a brand crisis rather than a sign of growth.

The creator economy is currently producing enormous quantities of consistent, on-brand, algorithmically optimised content. And it is producing very little that is genuinely surprising. Very little that makes you stop mid-scroll because something landed that you did not see coming, from a direction you did not expect, from a person who turned out to be more than the box you had put them in.

The audience that followed you for your niche will tolerate you staying in it. They will rarely follow you out of it. This is the trap. The niche becomes the perimeter of your public self, maintained not by your own choices but by the audience's expectations, which you created, and which now constrain you. You built the cage and walked in. The algorithm locked it behind you and called it a personal brand.

The most interesting people you have ever met did not have a niche.

They had obsessions that spilled into each other unexpectedly. They knew too much about one strange thing and nothing about something obvious. They changed their minds in front of you. They were interested in things that had no commercial application and no obvious audience. They were inconsistent in ways that were not a failure of discipline but a sign of an interior life that was still in motion, still being formed, still capable of being surprised by itself.

This is not compatible with the creator economy as it is currently structured. It does not produce consistent output. It does not build a recognisable brand. It does not tell the algorithm what box to put you in. It is, by every metric that the creator economy has decided to measure, a losing strategy.

And yet it is the only strategy that produces the kind of work that genuinely matters. Not the kind that accumulates followers or generates brand deals or sits within a clearly defined niche. The kind that makes someone feel, reading it at 2 in the morning, that they have been seen by something true. The kind that changes the person who reads it in a way they cannot fully account for. The kind that is still being thought about three years later, not because it was consistent, but because it was actually alive.

The niche is a market category. The self is not. The pressure to collapse the second into the first is producing an enormous amount of content and very little that is worth remembering.

Be less legible. It is the most interesting thing you can do.

xo,

musingsofacitygirl — still spiraling, still observing, still surviving beautifully

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