Tuesday evening on Earth. I’m currently at Monocle Café in Paris. And it’s sunny.
The platform Patreon has partnered with the new social network Perfectly Imperfect to release a joint list of “Rising Stars”: content creators and connected humans who are reinventing the logics of influence and community.
Running beneath this initiative is the emergence of a new kind of influencer, one who cultivates mystery rather than total transparency. To endure, it is no longer about pleasing the feed, but about distributing one’s reputation through cult-like dynamics and using gatekeeping to generate intrigue, encouraging audiences to seek out a person rather than simply follow them.
Gatekeeping as a driver of intrigue, and therefore of search
Some creators have grasped this intuitively: platforms like Meta now treat them as raw material in service of their own feeds. In December 2025, TechCrunch noted that follower counts have never mattered less; the algorithm no longer rewards profiles, but instea…
