12 August 2026
Irish belongs everywhere. Now it’s on UpScrolled
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Following someone takes even less effort. It's a tap, made in seconds, sitting alongside dozens of others on the same profile. A follow is a low-cost decision, one people make several times a scroll and rarely think about again.
For years, that wasn't a problem. Reach was the scoreboard. The bigger the audience, the bigger the opportunity, and success was measured by how many people you could get in front of, as quickly as possible.
When reach was enough
That model made perfect sense for the internet it was built for.
More views led to more followers. More followers created more reach. Reach attracted advertisers, partnerships and brand deals. Discovery was frictionless by design, and following someone required little commitment beyond tapping a button.
For creators, publishers and brands, growth became a numbers game. The goal wasn't necessarily to build relationships. It was to keep the graph moving in one direction.
What happened after someone hit follow rarely entered the conversation.
The model is starting to change
That approach is beginning to show its limits.
AI has made creating content faster and more accessible than ever. Editing, translating, designing and publishing work that once took days can now happen in minutes. As content becomes easier to produce, simply being discoverable becomes less of a competitive advantage.
At the same time, creators are investing more in direct relationships with the people who choose to follow them. Newsletter platform beehiiv expects to nearly double its annual revenue to $50 million in 2026, while the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report found that 27% of people globally now get news from news-focused creators or influencers every week.
People aren't simply looking for more content. They're looking for voices they value, recommendations they trust, and spaces where conversations continue beyond a single post.
Creators are asking different questions too. It's no longer just about how many people discover their work. It's about whether the people who chose to follow them will actually see it, engage with it, and feel part of something worth returning to.
Discovery still matters. It just isn't enough on its own anymore.
What happens after the follow
That's the question UpScrolled was built around.
Rather than treating a follow as the finish line, UpScrolled sees it as the beginning of a relationship. The platform is designed around the idea that social media should help people build communities, not simply collect audiences.
As founder and CEO Issam Hijazi explains:
"Community has always been at the heart of UpScrolled. We built the platform around a simple belief: people shouldn't just have a place to publish content, they should have a place to build communities that people genuinely want to come back to. When people feel like they belong, they don't just consume content, they contribute to it, strengthen it, and help it grow."
That philosophy shapes how the platform works. No shadowbanning, so recommendations reach the people they're intended for instead of quietly disappearing. No data sales, so trust doesn't come with a hidden cost. A feed designed to support meaningful conversations, not endless scrolling.
The difference is subtle, but significant.
An audience is measured by how many people arrive. A community is measured by how many people return.
Reach tells you who saw something, but community tells you who came back, who joined the conversation and who invited someone else in. Those are the relationships that can't be manufactured by an algorithm or bought through another burst of distribution.
As discovery becomes easier than ever, participation is becoming the metric that matters most.
The algorithm can get you seen. It can't get you missed.
Download UpScrolled:
About UpScrolled
UpScrolled puts people back in control of their social media experience. Founded by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist, it was built on a simple principle: social media should serve people, not exploit them. No shadowbanning. No data sales. Share freely, connect safely, trust your feed. Fairness and freedom in a digital landscape that has lost its way.
Media contact
Leila Dastyar | PR Director | leila@dna.online
