The Algorithm Is Not Your Audience
At some point, the audience changed.
Not the people — the platforms.
The metrics.
The quiet pressure to keep things short, polished, and performance-ready.
To speak not to someone, but through something.
Whether we admit it or not, most of us aren’t writing for people anymore.
We’re writing for the system.
Your Feedback Loop Is Lying to You
You post something. It gets traction. Feels good.
So you do it again. And again. And again.
Soon you’re not expressing — you’re replicating.
This is how feedback loops work.
They teach you that what gets rewarded is what should be said.
That signal clarity matters more than complexity.
That being “understood” means being predictable.
But platforms don’t understand nuance.
They optimize for engagement.
And engagement doesn’t equal impact.
It just means you hit the sweet spot of the system.
How AI Systems Reward Familiarity
AI-generated content, recommendation algorithms, and social feed curation all run on patterns.
They want things they can classify.
That they can serve up with confidence.
That “perform” in expected ways.
Which means:
- The edgier posts get filtered out.
- The more thoughtful ones get buried.
- The weird stuff? Ignored entirely.
And what rises to the top is what’s been seen before.
“Your originality is only useful to the system once it becomes a pattern.”
Communication Is Becoming Pattern Recognition
You’re not just expressing yourself anymore.
You’re trying to hit a format that signals credibility.
You’re trying to speak in a way that sounds smart — not necessarily one that makes people think.
It’s not just creators doing this.
Educators, marketers, even students — everyone’s learning to talk like the algorithm expects.
And the more we lean into that, the more our communication becomes a game of formatting, not meaning.
Without the Prompt — Who Are You?
AI tools are incredible.
But they also mirror us.
And if all we give them are cleaned-up, platform-safe versions of ourselves, that’s all they’ll ever learn to generate.
So here’s the uncomfortable part:
Strip away the structure.
Remove the prompt.
Close the template.
Do you still know what you want to say?
Or have you become fluent in saying what works?
Want to Go Deeper?
If this resonates, I explore it much more in my latest Substack piece:
→ When the system knows you too well
It’s about what happens when we let systems — not people — define how we communicate.
And what we lose when we stop noticing that shift.
