You built an audience. The algo doesn’t care.

When I was still a working journalist, I covered a story about TikTok’s uncertain future in the U.S. (back when it looked like it might get banned any minute). And every expert I spoke to, regardless of their angle, pointed to the same core innovation behind TikTok’s meteoric rise: discoverability.

You didn’t need a massive audience to break through. The app’s For You Page didn’t care who followed you… only whether you could hold someone’s attention. And if your content did that? It got served. Again and again. To millions of people who had no idea who you were mere minutes earlier.

That model didn’t just disrupt the old guard — it completely rewired how content platforms operate. And now, that same attention-first logic has quietly spread everywhere… even to LinkedIn.

That’s where this story gets tricky… because if you’re a founder, thought leader, or brand that spent years building an actual audience, this shift doesn’t feel like innovation. It feels like betrayal.

From followers to for-you: how LinkedIn caught the TikTok bug

Not long ago, LinkedIn’s feed was simple: you followed people, and when they posted, you saw it. The feed was mostly chronological. It favored consistency. Relevance. Niche expertise. 

(This is how Facebook and Twitter used to be, too… just different niches, different content, etc.)

Today? That’s all out the window, across the board.

Over the last few years, LinkedIn has slowly retooled its algorithm to prioritize “interesting” content — not necessarily from your network, but adjacent to it. It started small. You might’ve seen a post “someone you follow liked.” But now, it’s deeper than that.

In 2020, LinkedIn rolled out dwell time as a key ranking signal — if people slowed down on your post, even without engaging, the algorithm saw that as positive (which, I’ll chalk that up as one for the good guys because engaging content doesn’t always elicit a like, comment, etc.)

In 2023, they updated again. The algorithm now boosts posts with early engagement (likes, comments, views, dwell time) in the first hour — the “golden hour” test window. If a small test group reacts quickly? The post gets pushed to more people, including users outside your network.

But here’s the flip side: if that early group doesn’t bite? Your post is dead on arrival — even for the people who chose to follow you.

It’s a subtle shift. But it fundamentally changes what success looks like on the platform. You’re no longer rewarded for showing up consistently for your audience — you’re rewarded for hitting the right emotional trigger in the right format for the widest possible group at the right time.

And that’s where things start to break down.

Audience used to mean something. Now it’s just a test group.

The unspoken promise of social media was this: build a following, and you’ll have a direct line to the people who care about what you have to say. Yes, you don’t “own” that audience because it happens on “our” platform (“our” being the social media companies), but you have a relationship with your audience that we’ll honor and preserve.

That’s gone.

Follower count doesn’t guarantee distribution anymore. Even personal profiles with large followings see wild swings in reach, driven entirely by algorithmic performance in the first 60 minutes.

If you’re a founder who’s spent years showing up, building trust, and cultivating a niche audience, this new model feels like moving the goalposts.

People followed you because they wanted to hear from you. But now they won’t — unless you get lucky, go viral, or hit the latest format sweet spot.

Fickle reach. Shallow relationships. Homogenized content.

Let’s call this shift what it is: a race to the middle.

When every post is judged on its ability to attract broad engagement fast, the platform starts to reward sameness. You know the vibe:

• “Three lessons I learned from being slightly inconvenienced today…”

• “One thing no one tells you about entrepreneurship (but I will because I’m brave)”

• “This chart changed how I think about growth”
  
  

It’s not that these formats are bad — it’s that they’re everywhere. And they’ve become predictable because they’re the safest way to get rewarded by the feed. That leads to:

• Homogenized voice – everyone sounds the same

• Performative thought leadership – insight wrapped in clickbait

• Transactional followership – people remember the format, not the person

When everyone’s optimizing for attention, nobody’s building trust.

Even high-performing creators are feeling it. Data science educator Zach Wilson (who grew his following to >450k) recently noted that his technical posts in 2023 performed 4–5x better than his deeper, more niche content in 2025 — even though he has double the audience now:

“The TikTokification of LinkedIn’s algorithm is starting and you hate to see it.”
— Zach Wilson on LinkedIn

When even top creators are losing reach because they’re going deep instead of wide… what chance does a niche B2B brand or founder have?

You’re forced to reintroduce yourself with every post. That’s not strategy — that’s survival

Here’s the most insidious part: when the platform doesn’t reliably deliver your content to your audience, you stop trusting your own strategy.

Every post becomes a hail mary. You start chasing formats instead of building consistency. And your brand — the thing you were trying to reinforce with every post — starts to dissolve under the weight of trying to “win” each day’s algorithmic coin toss.

Yes, you can still get reach. And yes, attention-first discovery has its upsides — especially for new voices or underdog brands. But let’s be clear: this model devalues relationship-driven content.

It undermines the people and companies who played the long game. Who showed up. Who built something worth paying attention to… and now have to start from scratch with every post.

But I would also argue it doesn’t actually serve newer voices that well, either. Yes, in an attention-based feed, you can punch through to a big distribution much faster / with fewer swings. But even if that happens… and you DO see a huge bump in followers… it’s still much harder to build a lasting relationship with any of them when they may not see your content again for weeks or months. If you don’t crush that “golden hour” time and time again, your reach is throttled, even among those who signed up to hear from you.

So what do you do if you’ve actually built an audience — and still want to serve it?

A few things:

• Stop writing for the algorithm — start writing for the person
  That doesn’t mean ignoring format, but it does mean starting with what your audience needs… not what you think will earn a few extra impressions. Keep the hook strong, but keep the message true.

• Build off-platform touchpoints
  If you want a reliable way to reach your people, you need something the algorithm doesn’t control: a newsletter, a podcast, a community, a closed loop. LinkedIn is great for discovery… but it’s a brittle way to build connection.

• Play the game (but don’t lose the plot)
  Short-form video might outperform text right now (or maybe the algo has swung more toward text, which my anecdotal evidence seems to support… either way, that’s a shifting window to aim at). No matter what, though, if that video or carousel or post doesn’t sound like you… it’s not helping your brand. Format should serve strategy, not replace it. Give the algorithm what it wants, but on your terms.

Because if you’re building a business — or a personal brand — attention is not the endgame. Trust is.

Let me repeat: Attention is not the endgame… TRUST is.

Because at its core, that’s really all that content marketing and thought leadership are for… building trust, at scale.

If LinkedIn wants to turn every post into a popularity contest, fine. Them’s the brakes, I suppose. You just have to make sure your actual audience still recognizes you when you show up in their feed.

That’s the only way to make any of this worth it.