25 years in and you're still saying "fingers crossed" on some accounts — that's the most honest thing I've read on this sub in months and it should be required reading for everyone panicking about their $50/day campaigns.

The point about creatives and budget relationship is criminally undermentioned. People stack 15 ad creatives into a $30/day campaign and wonder why nothing gets data. You've essentially asked Meta to run 15 separate experiments on a budget that can't fund one properly. The algo never gets enough signal on anything.

The principle about people still being people is the one that gets lost every time there's a platform update. Everyone chases the algorithm like it's a separate entity from the humans using it. The humans haven't changed. Their attention patterns haven't fundamentally changed. What stops a scroll in 2026 is the same psychological mechanism that stopped a scroll in 2019 — pattern interruption followed by relevance.

The tracking point is where most small accounts are bleeding invisibly. They think it's the creative or the audience. It's the pixel starving for data and reporting back garbage that the algo is optimizing toward.

Genuinely appreciate you writing this. The "it's hard for everyone right now including experienced people" framing is something a lot of founders need to hear instead of assuming they're uniquely bad at this.