Hi Stephan, very well said, totally agree with you. You make an important point, actually two points.

1. Being original on Instagram and being therefore popular or successful doesn’t always come together. I was trying to make the case wider than Instagram. On IG there are some hidden rules embedded in the platform itself and in how we experience it: bold and strong composition for instance — as you correctly pointed out — usually stand out amongst more subtle ones. Unfortunately when you talk about photography today you always have to talk about IG, even if I don’t think IG to be a photographic platform but much more a visual social network, which are two pretty different things.
2. No gatekeeper doesn’t mean freedom. Or rather, it’s freedom but then some other hidden rules pop up, like: using this or that composition because they will get you exposition but then you’ll be just one popular photographer as many others, so how could I get an assignment despite being one amongst millions? I do believe that today we have a chance to be someone (original, successful, honest) bypassing the traditional gatekeepers like galleries, agencies and newspapers but we, at the same time, thought too soon they are irrelevant. They still are very important part of the process and we’d better have good relationships and respect them. They are part — in a broader sense — of the curatorial world, which is absolutely fundamental, probably much more today since there are really too many interesting things out there and it’s impossible to know them all. Every web platform should have a curatorial team that picks interesting profiles and highlights them. It happened on IG (now it’s slightly different) and is still happening on Unsplash or Medium. We still need advices and suggestions. How to get them? Hoping to get lucky or without being afraid to show off to those teams, writing, saying “Check out my profile” (I hate that but sometimes we don’t have to be shy) and things like that. Gatekeepers still matter.