π« My Facebook account got suspended today.
No warning. Just gone. My first thought wasn't panic. It was: I've been here before. Last year I spent a month inside a Skool community building real relationships. Level 6. Genuine conversations. Loom videos I spent hours on. Real comments on real posts from real people. Then I called out what I saw. New profiles running up 3,000 points in a week. Coordinated likes. Copy-paste responses that looked like a VA running a script. Here is what they were actually doing: Back then Skool ranked communities in discovery based on engagement scores. More engagement meant higher ranking. Higher ranking meant the front page. Front page meant new members finding you without spending a dollar on ads. That is a real strategy. A smart one. Until you manufacture the signal to game it. They needed authentic members posting authentic content to make the fake engagement look real. I was cover. The moment I named it, I became a liability. I got removed on November 2nd. By the end of the month I had secured a retainer with Jay. Working inside his community. Solving a bigger problem with more upside and more future. The platform removed me. The relationships I had built did not go anywhere. Here is what nobody says out loud: Chasing a metric might work for a while. The ranking climbs. The numbers look good. The owner screenshots the leaderboard for their sales page. Then the platform updates the algorithm. Or someone shares the pattern publicly. Or the manufactured activity stops and the ranking collapses in a week. There was nothing underneath it. There never is. Creating real value takes longer. It will not show up on a leaderboard in week one. Some weeks it will not show up at all. But it always works. Not sometimes. Not usually. Always. The metric was theirs. The relationships were mine. There is a difference between a community built to game a ranking and one built to actually grow people. You already know which kind of presence you're building.