I Got My Start in 2008 Black Hat SEO And Everything You’ve Been Taught About The Creator Economy Is a Fuck*ng Lie
You open the app for a second.
Just to see.
Hours later, you look up, neck stiff, eyes burning, thumb numb, you have seen a thousand lives, a hundred news cycles, ten revolutions in thought leadership. You have moved through endless bytes of data.
But you have not moved at all.
You are simply in a different part of the same, endless feed and you feel a profound and unnamed anxiety. You have been judged by the algorithm, and found guilty.
Every week, a new guru promises to reveal the secrets of the feed. They sit in front of a tastefully arranged bookshelf, sip artisanal coffee, and explain how you, too, can appease the algorithm by “building in public” and “providing value.” They make it sound like a system you can master.
But it’s an abyss. LOOK! It is staring back.
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Photo by Mathieu Deslauriers on Unsplash
Quick disclaimer:
This scream is not for everyone.
If you’re a fiction writer, a developer writing genuinely helpful tech tutorials, a historian sharing your passion, or anyone creating something outside the gravitational pull of the algorithm: this is not for you.
Back in around 2008 I was a teenager with no skills and a burning desire to earn some cash. A desire that led me not to shovel snow for 10 euros, but to the murky depths where the original feed was being poisoned: black hat SEO forums. While my peers were reading Hamlet, I was dissecting tutorials on how to hack search engine ranking algorithms, learning how to feed the high gods of Google. Automated comment spammers. Article spinners.
The ritual was simple: create mountains of nonsensical noise, fill it with keywords, point it at an affiliate link, and pray to the algorithmic gods so they would notice.
They did. At least for a time.
But I never really logged off. I finished university, got a job, left the job, got another job, but at those weak moments where sitting in an office chair makes you cry, I kept silently scrolling. Fast forward to what I see today, under the guise of “thought leadership,” what a scam that isis the same endless feed, just with better graphics and more invasive tracking. The old, clunky software that would spin up a thesaurus to switch words in your text to pass plagiarism tests has just been replaced by a slick AI that promises to generate your content for you, spun from the same texts that we used.
wow, we are really moving forward, huh?
It’s why everyone here writes like this.
Short sentences.
So you can understand.
See?
Easy words.
Lots
of
white
space.
Because I’m not writing for you.
I’m writing
for
the
bots.
The little spiders that crawl through the abyss.
So I can rank higher.
And you
will
click
my
link.
But who the fuck actually reads the content after that?
Here’s a bullet point:
- This makes my article look actionable, so you will pretend that you are moving somewhere.
are you?
This brings me to the ghosts in the machine, the posts that float by in the endless river. I saw one today where a writer, exhausted by their WordPress blog, found salvation in Substack. really? substack?Their frustration was real. But the gurus will take that honest cry of burnout, strip it of all nuance, and repackage it as a viral post titled: “I 10x’d my income by ditching WordPress. Here’s my 5-step framework.”
They will point to passages like this:
“But let’s be honest, [WordPress is] not easy to maintain. Plugins. Updates. Broken themes. The occasional white screens of death…”
The audacity to frame maintaining wordpress as some Herculean task.
This isn’t about WordPress being hard. This is about them selling you the idea that you are helpless. It is a manufactured crisis. It is an entire industry built on the premise that you are too tired or overwhelmed to type a question into a search bar. or, you know, just ask ChatGPT.They prey on that feeling, packaging minor, solvable problems as insurmountable mountains so they can sell you their “simple” solution.
It is an insult to your intelligence. if you have any left afters n-th thousand of "how I made 20-billion dollars in under 7 minutes!"
WAIT!
The algorithmic gods demand a listicle. Sacrifice must be made!
THE TRUST FALLACY: They tell you affiliate links work because of “trust.” What they don’t tell you is that building that trust takes years of consistent, high-quality work. They sell you a screenshot of the summit while hiding the graves of those who died on the climb. But sure, you can do it in only 5 days! shit, that's too long, ain't nobody got 5 daysYOU CAN DO IT BY SPENDING 30 MINUTES A DAY!!! you'll need 600 days in a row tho
THE NAZI PROBLEM: You want to talk about “maintenance”? Try maintaining your brand’s reputation when the algorithm keeps recommending your content alongside screeds from actual, literal fascists because the platform’s moderation policy is “lol, whatever.” shots at substack? Or just uniform online experience? Fuck, I don’t even know anymore.
This isn’t just about one post. It’s about the whole rotten feed.
It is a scroll drowning in:
The “I Quit My 9-to-5” Hero’s Journey. The epic tale of how you escaped your “soul-crushing” marketing job. Now work 80 hours a week optimizing sales funnels from a slightly more aesthetically pleasing laptop. You were a cog in the machine, and now you’re selling a course on how to be a better cog. Hey, congratz!
The AI Worship Hypocrisy. They write 3,000-word manifestos on the “Power of Authentic Human Storytelling” that were 95% generated by ChatGPT. They sell you a course on “finding your unique voice” while theirs is a subscription to OpenAI. ya know, majority of "self-help" books are written by ghost writers, who are now being replaced by LLMs lol xDDDD rawr
The Vague, Useless Advice.
“Be consistent.”
“Engage with your audience.”
“Create value.”
This isn’t advice; it’s the professional equivalent of telling a drowning person to “try swimming.” Why are there still homeless people out there? Have they tried owning a house?
This isn’t a community.
It’s a pyramid scheme.
with better fonts!!!
And yes, by perfectly mimicking the empty, viral format of the feed, I risk becoming the thing I hate. good, maybe that will land some clicks This very piece, with its rage-bait and faux-CTA, is performance art, nihilism dressed as a meme.
So, since we’re all just trapped in the same stupid scroll, let’s perform the ritual. Let’s make a sacrifice to the feed gods!
Here is the New and Improved Engagement Ritual for 2025. don’t worry, I’ll run this text through a thesaurus (aka chatgpt) and post it again next year!
Subscribe.
Smash that
button until your mouse breaks.
Buy a new one with my affiliate link NOW.
CLAP. YOUR. CHEEKS.
Not once.
Not fifty times.
A thunderous, procedural applause for this piece of shit of a text that is about nothing and about everything at the same time.
Comment!
Tell the algorithm how this post “resonated” with you and changed your entire “paradigm.” OH How your views were influenced! How you will be a better person, husband, son, daughter, brother, CEO, OnlyFans creator!
SEND YOUR RESIGNATION LETTER.
Quit your stable job immediately. You’re a content creator now.
your landord now accepts payments in exposure!
$$
Send Pics of Grandma’s Titties.
I don’t know why, but the
algorithm
demands
a
sacrifice.
$$
ALSO THERE’S HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA
And if you’ve done all that,
AMAZING! GOOD JOB!
now you can
GO
There.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see a new post on “7 Ways to Leverage Your Personal Brand by Yelling Into the Void.” I need to see what it says.
#Work #Satire #Rant #CreatorEconomy #BurnItAllDown #ScreamingIntoTheVoid #ImTiredBoss #NihilismAsAService
PS forgot em-dashes — — — — — — —
