By Jane Sonnenschein · March 19, 2026

Recently, I came across something on Xiaohongshu—a Chinese lifestyle and social discovery platform often loosely compared to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest—that was both fascinating and a little ironic.

A book influencer with half a million followers had been called out, and reportedly lost around 50,000 followers in a short period of time. Another creator left a rather clever comment underneath: at least those 50,000 people genuinely cared about books.

The whole story was interesting in its own right.

One creator decided to dig through this influencer’s old content. He described himself as the kind of book blogger who actually reads slowly and takes notes along the way. He had been creating book content for four years and had published only 49 reading notes in that time.

That was exactly why he became curious: how could a top book influencer read so many books in a single year and keep producing content about one book after another?

So he actually spent an entire month going through almost the whole profile of this influencer. He then traced the books the influencer had mentioned, discussed or recommended, one by one, and eventually turned the whole thing into an Excel spreadsheet.

Which book had been read when.

Which passages had been highlighted.

Which quotes had been presented as memorable.

Which book had supposedly been “the most healing.”

Which had been described as “the most meaningful.”

He listed everything, item by item.

The most dramatic part was that he even printed all of it out and turned it into a scroll four or five meters long, then slowly unrolled it in a video.

I almost laughed watching it. It felt less like someone fact-checking a book influencer and more like an autopsy of a carefully constructed “well-read” persona.

The creator later summarized what he called “ten signs of a fake book influencer.” One of them was especially funny: poor memory.

Why poor memory?

According to his spreadsheet, the influencer had called a book “the most meaningful” eleven times in a single year, and had used “the most healing” for more than ten different books. One month, one book was the most healing book ever. The next month, another one had taken its place.

And strangely enough, my first thought was not, “Did this person actually read those books?”

It was:

Does it really matter which book was the most healing? For a book influencer, perhaps the label “most healing” itself is what matters.

Watching all of this, I had mixed feelings.

Part of me found it funny. The internet now seems capable of dissecting almost anything.

But another part of me could not stop wondering:

What are platforms actually rewarding now?

Reading itself?

Or the persona of someone who looks very good at reading? 

In the past few years, book influencers have become increasingly common.

Open almost any platform and you see variations of the same scene: perfectly arranged bookshelves, beautiful desks, pages filled with dense notes, highlighted quotations, a cup of coffee beside the book, a 5 a.m. reading routine, and one “life-changing reading list” after another.

Everything looks right.

And if you see enough of it, you can easily develop the strange impression that everyone else is reading seriously, improving themselves and growing, while you alone are somehow standing still.

But precisely because these images have become so common, I increasingly find myself wondering:

Are these people really reading?

Or are they simply very good at performing the image of “I am someone who reads”?

That question is not meant to be harsh.

Because the platform itself naturally pushes things in the direction of what can be shown.

Real reading is often slow, dull and quiet.

When you truly get into a book, you do not necessarily come away with an instant quote. You may not immediately have anything to post. Finishing a book today does not mean that tomorrow you can already explain it with perfect confidence.

Often, real reading involves going back over the same passage again and again. Sometimes you get stuck. Sometimes you need to stop and think for a long time. Sometimes you finish a book and cannot even say clearly what you think about it yet.

But the persona of “someone who reads” works differently.

That persona photographs beautifully.

It has a recognizable visual language, recognizable poses, a recognizable atmosphere and a recognizable way of spreading online.

You do not necessarily need to understand a book deeply.

You only need to look enough like someone who reads seriously.

And that is where the problem begins.

Platforms are often better at amplifying the showability of content than the content itself.

Someone who is genuinely reading may only get through a dozen pages in a day. They might reach one paragraph and go back to it several times. They might finish reading and simply sit there thinking.

All of that is real reading.

But none of it is particularly easy to photograph, edit or package. It does not create an instant impression of “Look how much substance I have.”

A bookshelf, a reading challenge, a book list, beautiful notes, quotations, an aesthetically pleasing desk and a consistent persona, on the other hand, fit perfectly with the platform.

And so we end up with something that has become increasingly common:

People who genuinely read do not necessarily grow quickly.

But people who are very good at performing “I am reading” are often much easier to notice.

That is also why this can create such a strong sense of unfairness.

Some people genuinely read, think carefully and take time to digest what they have read, yet their audiences grow very slowly and making any money from their content is difficult.

Meanwhile, other accounts seem to post almost the same thing every day. The layout looks the same, the tone sounds the same, and even the “three things I learned today” begin to feel interchangeable. Yet their follower counts rise quickly, and brand collaborations arrive much sooner.

What makes this uncomfortable is not simply that “someone else became popular.”

It is the possibility that the platform may not actually be rewarding reading.

It may be rewarding the performance of reading.

In other words, what matters is not necessarily what you truly understood from a book. What matters is whether you can package the image of “I read seriously, I am growing, I am constantly improving myself” in a way that other people can understand instantly, envy instantly, and want to click on instantly.

That is worth paying attention to.

Because when platforms reward this kind of content for long enough, creators will gradually be pulled in that direction.

The question stops being whether they actually understood what they read.

Instead, they begin asking:

Does this page of notes look beautiful enough?

Does this photo have the right atmosphere?

Does this sentence sound enough like a memorable quote?

Does this title sound enough like “Only people who really read will understand this”?

Over time, reading itself slowly moves into the background.

What remains in front is an increasingly polished, increasingly effortless shell of the “knowledge creator.”

And that is where the irony becomes strongest:

More reading content on a platform does not necessarily mean more actual reading.

Sometimes it simply means that “reading” has become an increasingly reproducible persona. 

Once that persona becomes easy to reproduce, followers can come very quickly.

Because what it offers is not really reading itself.

It offers an extremely seductive illusion:

Look at me. This is how I read.

This is how I live.

This is how disciplined I am.

This is how I grow.

If you want to become better too, follow me.

That logic is almost perfectly suited to a platform.

It has the appearance of substance, the appeal of a lifestyle, and at the same time a stable persona that audiences can keep consuming.

But real reading often looks nothing like this.

Real reading does not necessarily make you look more polished.

Sometimes it leaves you more confused, more hesitant, quieter, and even less able to speak with certainty.

Because when a book truly enters you, it does not always turn immediately into “content.”

Sometimes it first becomes something that quietly sits inside you and slowly ferments. It may take a long time before it grows into an understanding that genuinely feels like your own.

And that is why I increasingly think the most important question today is not whether that particular influencer was “fake.”

The more interesting questions are:

What do we actually want to watch? And what are platforms actually pushing toward us?

If we become increasingly used to watching only people who look as though they read well, then slow, clumsy and honest reading will naturally become harder and harder to see.

In the end, whether one book influencer has a scandal or falls from grace is not really the most important part of the story.

What matters is that it reveals something very typical of the platform age:

People with genuine substance are not necessarily the best at gaining followers. And those who gain followers most efficiently may sometimes simply be the people who are best at performing the image of “I have substance.”

That is the part worth being cautious about.

Because if even reading—something that is naturally quiet, slow and badly suited to performance—eventually becomes a persona, a staged image and a repeatable content template, then what the platform rewards is no longer reading.

It rewards the appearance of being someone who reads.

And if a society becomes increasingly skilled at producing the appearance of well-read people while finding it harder and harder to notice those who genuinely read, then what we may lose is not only the quality of content.

We may also lose our trust in real thinking itself. 

Later, though, another thought occurred to me.

Perhaps the problem is not only what platforms reward.

People are used to blaming platforms for everything: what they recommend, what they amplify, what they push in front of us.

But to some extent, platforms are also simply responding to users.

They certainly control distribution. But whether a certain kind of content keeps being fed and amplified ultimately also depends on whether people want to watch it, want to believe it and want to imagine themselves inside it.

Platforms do not create users out of nothing.

Often, they simply understand earlier than we do what is most likely to hold our attention.

Real reading is slow.

Real thinking is tiring.

Actually changing yourself is even harder.

But looking as though you are growing is remarkably easy to show—and remarkably easy to become addicted to.

A lot of so-called reading content today may not really be selling books at all.

What it sells is a feeling that is extremely easy to consume:

I read a book today and immediately felt healed.

I started reading, drinking coffee, writing by hand and living slowly today, and suddenly I am a completely different person.

I saved this post, and somehow it feels as though I am already one step closer to becoming a better version of myself.

So what platforms amplify is often not reading itself.

They amplify the illusion of growth, the illusion of healing, the illusion of becoming better.

From this perspective, yes, platforms reward certain kinds of content.

But they are not only rewarding what they want to push.

They are also rewarding what users most want to click on, most want to believe and most want to see themselves in.

The platform caters.

The creator performs.

The user projects themselves into it.

Perhaps the thing we should be most cautious about is not who is deceiving whom.

It is the possibility that all three are working together to make the illusion feel more and more real.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 平台奖励的，到底是读书，还是“会读书的人设”？

German version: Was belohnen Plattformen eigentlich – Lesen oder die Inszenierung eines „beliesenen Menschen“?