There was no precise day when you lost control.
There was no conscious choice.
It happened slowly, through accumulation. You published something valuable: perhaps a thought, or expertise cultivated over years. You received few likes. Then you published something reactive, immediate. It worked.
Your brain registered the lesson.
Not rationally. Automatically, preconsciously. This content gets rewarded, that one does not. From that moment on, your editorial strategy began bending one millimetre at a time towards what the algorithm rewarded. Not towards what builds your brand.
The most insidious result of this mechanism is not editorial: it is structural. A corporate brand dependent on the founder’s presence on social media is not a brand: it is a performance. It cannot be sold, delegated, scaled or transferred. It exists as long as the publishing continues. And this is a problem that no editorial calendar can solve.
No one explicitly told you to do it. The platform did not ask you to. It simply trained you, and it did so using the most effective system known for modifying human behaviour.
Instagram distributes social hierarchy
This is the point almost no one articulates, and it changes everything.
Likes are signals of public approval and position within the group, more than engagement metrics. The human brain is evolutionarily programmed to monitor its own social status within a community. It was once a matter of survival. Today, that same neurological architecture reads likes as indicators of hierarchy.
When a piece of content performs well, the brain does not simply register “this worked”. It registers “my position within the group has improved”. And when it does not perform, it processes exactly the opposite.
Every notification generates a micro release of dopamine. This cycle leads individuals to assess their own social value based on reactions to their posts. The dopaminergic reward of likes can become more desirable than real connections.
For an entrepreneur, this has a precise consequence: you begin negotiating your symbolic position, perhaps in front of clients, competitors, colleagues or partners, through the approval signals of a platform designed to maximize engagement, not authority.
The slot machine wearing your brand
There is an analogy that behavioural researchers have used for decades to describe this mechanism, and it is the most precise one available.
Intermittent reinforcement, the reward that arrives unpredictably, is the most effective system known for creating behavioural dependence. Not the guaranteed reward, nor the absent one. The one that arrives sometimes and sometimes does not, without a predictable pattern.
Social platform algorithms are designed to deliver random rewards. This intermittent system is particularly effective at maintaining high levels of attention and encouraging compulsive use. Even the mere anticipation of a possible notification is enough to trigger dopamine release.
The slot machine is therefore the perfect technical description of how the platform’s reward system works, and it is exactly the same mechanism that governs your editorial choices when you are not the one governing them.
Every time you check the statistics of a post in the first few hours after publishing, every time you change the tone of a piece of content because “the last three did not perform”, or choose a topic based on what worked the previous week, you are pulling the lever.
What happens to the brain in the meantime
From a neuroscience perspective, the compulsive consumption of content optimized for engagement places significant strain on the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for executive functions, strategic thinking, and long-term decision-making.
The prefrontal cortex is exactly what you need to build positioning, to make decisions that cost in the short term but pay off in the long term, and to resist immediate gratification in favour of something more solid.
Every time you give in to the algorithm’s dopaminergic cycle, you are weakening the cognitive structure you need to think strategically.
Algorithms favour content that provokes strong emotions: anger, fear, outrage. Over time, those who produce content on these platforms no longer see their own strategic objective but a filtered version of their communication, built to maximize the platform’s attention.
The distinction that saves or destroys positioning
There is only one distinction that matters in this territory.
Sacrificing value to gain visibility and volume is a mistake.
Using visibility and volume to build value, on the other hand, is fundamental.
Direction is everything. It is not about being present or absent on social media. It is about who controls the relationship between you and the platform.
If your editorial choices are dictated by the algorithm’s feedback, and therefore if you publish what performs instead of what positions, you are building a brand that is algorithmically optimized and strategically empty. You are generating noise, not value.
Being watched does not mean being respected. Having reach does not give you authority. Gaining followers does not position you anywhere.
Over the last ten years, digital marketing has been built on visibility. Over the next decade, it will be built on credibility. Campaigns perceived as authentic significantly outperform those that are exclusively performative, with +47% qualitative engagement and +32% brand recall.
How to get out of it
By changing who controls the relationship.
The question every entrepreneur should ask before publishing is not “will this work with the algorithm?”, because asking that question already describes a dependence.
The real question, rather, is: “does this strengthen the positioning I want to build over time?”
If the two answers coincide, then you are in an ideal position because you are using the platform as an amplifier of something that already exists.
If they diverge instead, and therefore what would perform is not what builds, you have a governance problem, not a content problem.
The public in 2026 is looking for imperfection, process, human texture, because authenticity has become the most powerful signal of credibility in an ecosystem saturated with optimized content. The most strategic content you can publish today is the content that looks least optimized. It demonstrates that your thinking was not calibrated to please the algorithm but to build something that stands the test of time.
The uncomfortable truth
Many of the entrepreneurs I respect most have become, without realizing it, slaves to a feedback system designed to maximize time spent on the platform.
They are certainly not naive people. The mechanism I have described, however, is sophisticated, subtle and neurologically powerful, built by some of the best behavioural engineers in the world to transform your need for approval into a variable that the platform can measure and exploit.
Recognizing it is the first step towards stopping the negotiation of your symbolic position on a slot machine and returning to building it in a way no algorithm will ever be able to measure: through real results, genuine relationships and positioning that holds up even when reach collapses.
New Connections (FAQ)
Do social media harm strategic thinking?
In technical terms, yes. The compulsive consumption of content optimized for engagement puts pressure on the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for strategic thinking and long-term decision-making. Every time you give in to the algorithm’s dopaminergic cycle, you weaken the cognitive structure necessary to build positioning.
What is the difference between using social media for positioning and using it to gain visibility?
Direction. Those who use social media for positioning aim to strengthen what they want to build over time. Those who use them merely for visibility ask only how well a piece of content will perform. The two questions lead to different choices, different brands and, in the long term, different results. Visibility without positioning produces reach. Positioning with visibility produces authority.
How can you tell whether your editorial choices are governed by the algorithm or by strategy?
A simple test is enough: in the last month, how many times have you modified a piece of content or chosen a topic based on what had performed the week before? If the answer is often, you are not the one guiding the editorial strategy; the platform’s feedback is. The clearest signal is when you stop publishing something valuable because “it usually does not work”.
BLISS®
© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED