For the last 25+ years I’ve been doing the same thing: living a real, messy life and writing about it.
I walked away from a corporate tech job in Seattle in 2000, bought a broken-down VW bus for $100, and lived in it while traveling the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I left the U.S. in 2008 thinking I was gone for good. I lived in Morocco, Turkey, and eventually came back for family — first to Oregon, then Hawaii. I built stability there, then left again when things turned hostile after 2016. I’m now split between Chiang Mai and a house in Hokkaido, Japan.
Along the way I wrote 30+ books — novels, travel stories, anarchist manifestos, zombie Bibles, NFT experiments, and serialized fiction like Hasan i-Sabah and The Holy Bible with Zombies. I built Baoism because I needed a simple rhythm I could actually live by. I built Xcrol.com because I got tired of every conversation being owned by algorithms.
I did all of it the old way — raw, human, non-optimized, from an actual life.
For a long time it worked.
Early Twitter (@vagobond), early blogging, early Google PageRank — those systems rewarded people who lived interesting lives and wrote about them honestly. I built real followings the hard way.
Then everything changed.
Google was the first big one. In 2011–2013 they rolled out Panda and Penguin updates that gutted PageRank and AdWords for anyone who wasn’t playing the new game. Suddenly independent sites and bloggers who had ranked for years on real content got buried. The web stopped rewarding depth and started rewarding optimization, backlinks, and corporate signals.
The social platforms followed the same pattern.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, and later X all shifted from chronological/human-curated feeds to heavy algorithm-driven ones. Old accounts with large but low-engagement followings got throttled. The platforms decided those audiences were “stale” and simply stopped showing the posts. Newer, higher-velocity accounts took over.
That is exactly what happened to me.
My recent posts — even the fiction chapters and honest Baoism pieces — now get single-digit to low double-digit impressions on X. LinkedIn is barely better. Substack engagement is almost nonexistent. The old accounts still have the follower numbers I worked so hard to earn, but the platforms treat them like ghosts.
I kept posting from the same accounts because I didn’t want to throw away the numbers I had built over years. I thought the history would count for something. It turned out it counted against me.
This is not some unique conspiracy against me. It happened to an entire generation of creators:
- GenX and older millennial writers, travel bloggers, indie authors, podcasters, and nomads who built real audiences in the 2005–2015 “human web” era.
- People who wrote long-form, personal, non-optimized content instead of chasing daily virality.
- Those of us who documented actual lives instead of manufacturing content for the algorithm.
- Anyone whose brand was “I lived this” rather than “here’s today’s optimized hook.”
Plenty of much bigger accounts got hit the same way. Katy Perry, Rihanna, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ashton Kutcher all watched their reach collapse during the big algorithm shifts and bot purges. Many early travel bloggers and independent writers who were huge on the old web simply disappeared from feeds unless they paid for Premium or started fresh accounts.
Some people avoided the trap entirely. They started clean new accounts after 2018–2020 and rebuilt with the new rules. They adapted early to short-form, video-first, high-velocity posting. They treated their old accounts as archives and poured energy into fresh profiles.
I didn’t do that. I kept pushing the old accounts because I didn’t want to lose the numbers I had earned the honest way.
The system decided those accounts were no longer valuable and buried them.
Does this sound like you?
If you’re a GenX or older millennial creator who built something real in the early internet days, poured years into honest work, and then watched the numbers slowly die while newer, more optimized accounts took off — you’re not alone and you’re not crazy.
The system changed under you.
Your work is still good. Your voice is still real. The platforms just stopped showing it.
Like this post if it resonates. Subscribe if you want the next piece. Reshare if you know someone else who’s been quietly buried the same way.
Tell me in the comments or replies: Did this happen to you too? When did you first notice the drop, and what did you try?
Next up: “What to Do About It” — the practical moves that actually work in 2026 without turning you into something you’re not.
— CD