I got shadow banned on X, 3 mistakes that led me to it
So here I was, overly excited to spread the word about "The Underdog Indies" - a free AI comic series I'm creating exclusively to promote small Indie Hackers struggling with distribution.
I drafted an overly excited post about it, built a funny comic (or so I thought) and hit Post button.
2 hours later, I had ~200 impressions, but it got stuck there, and I didn't immediately realise why... It was around 3 AM, so I went to sleep and checked again after waking up. The impressions were around ~500 but engagement was pretty low. I checked with my friend's account if he could see my post. And boom all the replies I made to my own posts were marked "This post is unavailable" and I started contemplating what I had done wrong...
3 big mistakes
Taking advice from grok (in Expert mode) on how to promote my post and reach a wider audience. Yes! it kind of led me to digging my own grave. It asked me to repost my own post immediately. It suggested me the threads where I should post a thoughtful reply linking my post immediately. So I did and ...
This one wasn't grok, just my dumb intution. I thought tagging and DMing biggies like @IndieHacker and @ProductHunt would really be a great idea. My internal reasoning was, sole purpose of it was to help other small Indie Hackers get more eyes on their great product and I have no plans to make money out of this comic (the way I would pay the bills is by cross promoting my comic maker). Turned out nor Indie Hackers want me to promote them (except 3 kind souls) neither X want me to tag these biggies. But I'm not sure how DMs work in X yet, maybe they didn't reach too?
Couldn't control my own excitement. Replied to comments left within seconds. Was liking replies of handful of people who supported me with sub milliseconds. The irony is AI makes you go fast, but there's a speed limit imposed by all the modern social media to slow you down if you are just getting started. And it sucks!
Few good things happened...
I learned the hard way how dangerous it is to rely entirely on a single platform (talk about a Single Point of Failure, lol). A single mistake and shitty algorithm can fu*k all your efforts. I lost the visibility on my 11 day streak that I was maintaining for 30 day 30 comic challenge.
I created an account on Bluesky and will be treating it as my primary account.
Creating a personal blog website to have absolute control.
Another big decision I made
This one seems unrelated but maybe pushed the buttons of the X algo. The tool I have been creating generates comic panels using AI and everytime I post I get that little "Made with AI" tag so maybe just maybe AI generated images are the culprit itself.
The big decision I made is. I'm pivoting to a simpler, vector-math-based image generation system for my comic creator. No AI BS. Only ethically generated SVGs from now on! I'm using characters from Openpeeps to begin with, but will be adding mathematically generated mountains, water, cars etc going forward. TBH, I never truly wanted to make money out of AI-generated art anyway and thinking of ways to avoid that. So now I can sleep peacefully!
PS
Hope you found something useful from this.
My X post which caused all this apocalypse in my tiny world - https://x.com/IndieKartik/status/2065075157547483375?s=20. I feel bad that you won't be able to see the comic I created.
Will be cross posting my blogs on substack now, would really appreciate your support - https://substack.com/@iamkartikshrivastava
Cheers!
