A platform flagged my account as "not a real person." It was right, and it taught me something about marketing.

Something happened this month that stung more than any bad launch.

A platform I'd been active on started rejecting every post I made. No links, no promotion, just genuine questions rejected anyway. I emailed support expecting a bug. The answer was worse: my account had stopped reading as a human. It read as a channel.

Not banned for anything specific. Just quietly reclassified. And when I went back and counted, I couldn't argue. Over three months I'd posted about my product ~30 times there. Every post individually sincere. All of them, underneath, the same move me talking about my thing, to people I'd never once talked with.

I thought I was building in public. I was broadcasting in public. From the inside those feel identical, which is exactly why I couldn't see it. Every single post felt genuine, so I never questioned the pattern the posts added up to.

The uncomfortable lesson: I optimized every individual post and never once checked the ratio. How many times I showed up for someone else's thing vs. showed up with my own. Mine was indefensible.

What gets me is that a dumb automated filter spotted a pattern in my behavior that I was far too close to see myself. Which is the exact thing I keep claiming tools should do for founders.

So, genuinely asking the room: for those of you who post in communities as part of building what's your actual show-up-for-others vs. post-about-yourself ratio? Do you track it at all, or did you also only find out the hard way?