Social Media: What Not To Do If You Want Lasting Growth in 2025 with Tim O’Hearn

Most first-time founders think that social growth is about hacking the algorithms. A clever DM trick, a boost from automation, or a viral post that puts you on the map. But if your brand feels invisible, or worse, if it pops up and disappears, If it pops up again and disappears again, the real problem might be the tactics you are using or the ones you never questioned. Today's guest used to build growth hacks that broke the internet, but now he's pulling back the curtain on what not to do if you expect and want a real lasting growth in 2025. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders, to bring you enough love tips on how to grow. If you enjoyed the show, please do me a favor, hit that subscribe, and do send me your biggest growth questions at masteringtechnical.com. I'd love to know what you're working on and what's getting in your way. Joining me today is Tim O'Hearn. Tim is a software engineer, a former black hat growth practitioner, and the author of a book titled Framed: A Villain's Perspective on Social Media. Tim's been inside the system, building tools that manipulated feeds, scaled fake engagement, and exploited attention at mass scale. Tim, awesome to have you.

Hey, Mike, happy to be here.

So I got your book in my head, Tim. A-Framed: A Villain's Perspective on Social Media. It's a thick 400-page book, right? Full of great stories, first-person. Perspective stories of how to game the system, of how to hack the algorithms, effectively everything you should not do in 2025 if you, if you expect to build trust in social media and actually leverage that to build your business. So before we go into the main topic, Tim, we'd love to ask this question every single guest. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

When I think about tech growth, I think about the uniqueness of the startup, and whether that's Zero to One or any other software-based or even hardware innovation-based business, you often have an audience or potential customer base that is extremely large. So to master that growth means to capture as much of the audience, you know, as possible, as feasible, which is often quite unique in high technology businesses compared to traditional consumer businesses.

Okay, so when you say it's quite unique, what, what comes in your mind when you define that uniqueness?

Specifically in the software space, adoption is very, very easy to streamline now because everyone has an internet connection, uh, and advertisements. Like, you can go from learning about a product to buying a product to using a product to being one of the biggest proponents of a product in the span of a day. And that's very, very unique in the digital digital product space.

Okay, so we're basically saying, um, that's our uniqueness if we're building something online. So how that compares to like, um, a shop, a physical shop, you know, we— I have an e-commerce which I go online. So we're saying that is unique in the sense that it's easier than to a physical shop when it comes to promoting, uh, giving the product in people hands. Is that what we mean?

Definitely. There's tighter loops of innovation and also tighter feed— back and delivery loops as well.

So we're almost saying it's a lot easier to build online business than a retail business as a result. Maybe the market is a lot more crowded and a lot more competition. I still feel like it's not that easy. Like you put it, you know, it's like it's fairly easy, but I tried a couple of businesses, you know, online and a couple were successful, of course, but a lot, a lot of them failed. And I feel like it's still fairly difficult to navigate. The internet space quite well.

There are fewer barriers to entry for sure, and many, many less barriers to scaling. But every niche at this point is quite saturated, right? So it's quite easy for someone to say, oh, like Mike has this business or Tim has this business. What would it take for me to do that myself? It's also very, a very, very level playing field, which can cause a lot of oversaturation in a lot of niches.

I do agree. I mean, the entry point right now with AI as well, helping you to launch the websites and the product, I mean, allowing you to code up a lot. It's, it's becoming surprisingly easy to start something and then it becomes this game of attention, which very nicely leads into our topic, right? Like how do you leverage where everyone is chilling, which is the social media, to actually be there and get their attention to bring to yourself and potentially, you know, grow your business. And most founders, they don't really want fame, right? Like, they don't go to social media to go like, oh, I'm gonna be influencer, right? They don't chase fame, but they, they want growth. Like, they understand fully that social media has that ability. And along the way, somehow these two got just confused. Like, even for myself, like, I'm, I'm on socials not because I want to be famous, right? I'm on socials because I think I have a message, a point of view I want to share, but want it or not, I find myself chasing likes and shares and attention, right? And I'll be honest, Tim, like, I really want to pay some Indian guys to give me followers, you know, and just spam everybody, right? So I feel like it's very easy to get sucked into that, right? And you wrote a book about this and you went like, that's a very bad idea to do this. Can you just let us know why in the first place it's a bad idea to chase that?

Overall, it's this trap that is uniquely, uh, in this information, information age society in the 2010s and 2020s where we started to realize that there were these opportunities to promote businesses on the internet.

Yeah.

And very quickly we found that, uh, you know, those who started businesses were often intertwined with the success of their business whether they wanted to be or not. So we say, hey, you you can start a business online and suddenly you could maybe promote it under the guise of your page or your brand. But oftentimes we saw that brand being conflated with the brand of the founder. And I make the case that that's actually quite dangerous because then the founder's regular social media activity, uh, may be mistaken for improving the business or doing competitive intelligence work for the business. So there is a huge chapter, um, you know, in the book where I talk about that and the failings of just way too much of this fixation on social metrics, specifically for, uh, business owners, especially of small businesses.

Okay, so we're basically saying that a business brand and a founder brand, that's two separate brands, and we don't want to mix those.

Generally speaking, We don't, but also the point is that the view you would see as an individual, your newsfeed, is not dissimilar to the view that you would see if you were logged in as your brand or your page. Of course, there would be some differences, but to reach out to customers or to understand the competition is very, very, uh, it's pretty much the same pathway as you would explore if you were just mindlessly scrolling before you went to bed at night, you know, as an individual. So because a lot of these exist in the realm, my case is that a lot of this is simply wasted time and it's quite dangerous to put too much importance on that or to, again, to conflate usage with an actual pathway to improve your business or your business savvy.

Okay, so we're effectively saying that if you're getting these likes and people seeing you, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what you should be chasing. Your metrics evaluating the success of your brand, of your business being on social should not be those. So which leads to that question, it's like, what should we actually care about then, like KPI-wise?

The biggest issue I saw, uh, with the business I ran, and I, in the book I named it Shark Social, so it was an Instagram growth business, meaning people came to us because they wanted more Instagram followers, likes, and generally speaking, engagement, right? Anyone at this point in 2025, you can look at what we did and say, Okay, this seems like a good first step at getting conversions, at building a sales funnel.

Yeah.

And maybe doing some lead generation.

Mm-hmm.

Most of our customers, and when I say most, I mean over 90%, during 2017 to 2022, didn't think like that. So the real problem is that people weren't even connecting what was, you know, these digital importance metrics to the things that we think of today, like conversions. So to answer the question, I would say, of course we're thinking about things like email list signups, page views on an external website, and then ultimately some type of sales conversions. The funny thing is that most of these people who were buying my service did not have a product to sell. They were kind of building their own influencer brand first, right? And hoping to make it work at some point in the future. Which of course has its own issues.

So effectively what we're saying is that at the end of this funnel, which starts with attention on social media, is something we're selling. So it's likely a very long funnel, or maybe actually it's quite simple. It's like, hey, get some attention, make sure people see you, make sure they click on a link in your profile or in your post, they go to a website, in that website potentially we convert them, we get their email or they buy something. But effectively, all that funnel leads to whatever we feel is definition of value for us. And we need to have that strategic view first before we go in and go like, hey, let's spend thousands on get more likes.

I agree. That's very important. And it's also important to realize that some businesses do not work like that. I would say maybe one example would be photographers. I think naturally photographers do very well on Instagram, but the conversion percentage for a photographer either getting new clients or getting someone to purchase, you know, higher definition images with that, with, with, you know, uh, rights, uh, is probably extremely low. Like, it's probably sad how low it is. So the idea that just because people are engaging with content that they're also, uh, coming with the intention to buy something or to subscribe, that could also be very far-fetched, even if the content is extremely compelling.

Mm. Why is that?

Well, searching with intent is a huge part of the internet. And when I was first involved with Shark Social, so I was brought into it as the tech guy.

Mm-hmm.

And I thought it was a bad idea because whenever I had really searched for, you know, followers or likes. I was just looking to buy, you know, oh, give me 10,000 and I'll move on with my life. For most people, they might only make that purchase once in their life and they— it's kind of scammy so that they disappear, you never do it again. But what I found when I became involved with Shark Social was that people were searching with intent. So not only were they looking for the fake followers, but they were looking for these organic growth services like Shark Social. And once they visited the website, the chance of them signing up was exceptionally high. Our conversion rate at Shark Social from organic search at times exceeded 10%. So organic click to paid trial sign up, uh, exceeded 10%. And that's why I would say searching with intent is very important. On the other side of the coin, I've written a blog for more than 10 years now, and I write very niche topics on things that interest me and are kind of aligned with my specialties. And sometimes there will be an Amazon affiliate link there. Yeah. But it's so deeply embedded, and you realize when somebody reads one of my posts, they might just be looking for information, not necessarily do they have their wallet out looking for a per— you know, something to purchase. In the social media space, especially around 2018, 2019, searching with intent was huge. And I'm sure still today when people are searching for fake followers or just grow followers, grow likes, they probably are prepared to spend some amount of money like right then and there.

Hmm. I love you calling that out, the search with intent. And we had a couple of ad experts on the show and they literally say the same thing is that Not all social media platforms are actually equal. Some actually have very low conversions, and Instagram is one of them. People just simply don't go there, uh, or don't search or don't scroll to the feed with intent to buy. I mean, you can still convert, of course. You're getting all these products coming up in Instagram, and same in Twitter. But compared to, for example, something like Google Ads, when it comes to conversions, these platforms are not that great. Depends on the product as well. And the search with intent, uh, we had a couple of SEO experts on the show as well. That, that's pretty much what you want to do right now. You really want to target with your blog post an actual intent and try to answer that intent with your content and then potentially maybe have a CTA. That's, I mean, that's a, that's a great insight, Tim. So which leads me to this question: why brands are still chasing virality then? Like if we saying that chasing numbers such as views and just likes, just from a pure engagement perspective within that social media, and it doesn't go out to like your website or whatever, you know, conversions you're targeting, why do brands invest money into just chasing these viral trends and in moments looking embarrassing?

Most people who are building businesses or promoting businesses on social media come from a background of personal use. And whether that means you started using Web 2.0 in 2005 or 2012 or 2020, what you've witnessed is viral success. And that term has evolved, of course, over the years, where then there's a lot of fake viral things. Now people know how to kind of abuse and push some of the algorithms on certain sites. The point is that anyone who's now calling themselves an expert in this type of marketing or growth does understand what it takes to go viral or simply to have greater reach than existing audience. I think in a general sense, it makes sense to want to chase that. But oftentimes chasing it means compromising the values of the brand or doing things that are attention grabbing. Yeah, while not necessarily showcasing, uh, the best parts of the brand. Most brands and products do not naturally have an eye-catching, uh, short-form video style, um, like showcase. Like, it's just not natural. And in a lot of cases, I think we're finding, um, the way we're stealing attention in 2025, it does kind of undermine brands and it makes me view them differently.

Oh yeah, 100%.

You know, like, a slight tangent here is that in my book I have chapter 4, it's called Algorithms and Truth, and it talks about how algorithms and other things that we see alongside our content affects our belief in its credibility. And the example I would give that's related to this is that when you're on a news site, and maybe not like the New York Times but like a local type journalist site, if you see ads that are highly inflammatory or very low quality, that might affect your perception of the journalism that it's next to. So you see a news story and then next to it you have a like Chumbox ads. You're probably gonna think less of that, you know, of that publication. And I think the same can be said for people trying to chase viral trends or using the wrong types of influencers to promote their events. Where it's like, okay, they're throwing money at a problem or they're willing to give this to the higher bidder. So for me, that affects the way that I see some of these brands.

Yeah. And I have this quote from, from Sprout Social, which effectively echoes the point you just made, Tib. So they did the research this year in 2025. And what they found is that 33% of users say that trend-chasing brands now feel embarrassing or out of touch. So effectively, if you have a brand and there's a viral trend which is happening right now, which on TikTok, they all pretty much are funny to some extent or dancing or whatever. And then you see brand doing this, you want it or not, you suddenly start seeing that brand in different colors. At least for me personally, I've seen that. I'm like, hmm, I don't know, man. That's not, that's not great color on you. So I have this question then. If we saying, um, you know, viral is viral, right? Like people engage with various things and for whatever reason, but there's, uh, there's, uh, uh, coaches and people who teach on this virality elements, which effectively just understanding how algorithms work and teaching you how to effectively game the system. And I'm a like sucker for knowledge and courses. I buy a lot of that. Stuff. And I actually have a couple of them right now which got released in this year where people are literally teaching you how to be viral consistently, effectively, how to game the system. And it leads to this ethical question. It's like, if you want to do this, are you compromising on ethics on your— and your own belief just to be always at the top? Or is there like— doesn't— like, is there a way to do virality good? If that makes sense what I'm asking.

It does make sense and I think it's a natural need. I have a business degree in addition to a computer science degree. So when I took some of those marketing classes, they provide a playbook for what good marketing looks like and they provide case studies. But back in the day when I was in school, of course we weren't looking at viral trends. It makes sense today that a lot of sales and inbound marketing, it's shifted to the internet. And that we look to case studies of things that have worked on the internet.

Yeah.

And naturally we now have people saying, here's how to beat the algorithm. On the topic of beating the algorithm, I view a lot of those people with suspicion because they haven't built the algorithm, first of all. And secondly, um, it's almost impossible to reverse engineer how it really works. The second part is the ethics, or like, what might you be sacrificing or compromising to be following or chasing these trends. It's really, really difficult because there is a trade-off between establishing a brand or even an aesthetic. Like, I believe that there's some value in establishing a consistent style of posting, um, and what going viral actually means. So it's very difficult because if more and more people subscribe to these same courses as you, you won't have the same edge, right? Like, Mike will have more trouble getting coverage for his stuff because everybody's doing the same thing. Then the platforms take note, then the platforms have to control it, uh, somehow. Uh, there has to be some toleration and thresholds for that. So that's where I think it becomes, uh, problematic. It's unfortunate that that's what the internet has become. Uh, but we've even seen that on Reddit. Like, you probably remember using Reddit for the first time many years ago. The quality baseline was higher and the content was much more believable. It was much more authentic. And organic. Uh, in my book, I, I address the, the topic of sock puppets, which is this revelation that you or I could control 4 or 5 different accounts and use those to sock puppet or to boost our comments or our posts. And you would find that consistently with that little extra boost, you would always be the top comment, or you would always be in the running for the top comment on a new thread, even in a very popular subreddit. So I think it's one and the same where Reddit still has a very sneaky problem with sock puppets, which was first, you know, identified more than 10 years ago. So these practices, ultimately, when we talk about going viral and then what does growth hacking mean, and then like when does hacking actually mean breaking terms of service, we will see a lot more enforcement of what I consider to be terms of service violations.

That's actually very, very, very strong shout there, Tim. I personally right now sit in probably about 4 groups of engagement, and I'll give you the backstory. So I'm just getting added to them by people within my network, and effectively they create a bundle of people on WhatsApp, right? There's like 40, 70 people, and then they write the post, something more just a casual post, something they really care about, maybe promoting their services or something like that. Or maybe it's a newsletter on LinkedIn, and they basically share that link and they go, hey, you know, hey guys, can I get some love? And effectively the group will go like and leave a comment, which to your point absolutely puts you in that algorithmic view that potentially there's some— I just posted and I'm getting real engagement right now, maybe it is good post, so maybe I will promote this to more people. And I don't use them because I feel like, um, I feel like algorithms are really good at now sensing this and leading, uh, to effectively shadowbans. I feel like you're getting flagged if you're participating in this, and I think there's very clever way how they can measure this out. For example, you're getting likes from people you don't usually interact with. For example, you don't like their stuff, they don't like your stuff, but suddenly they liked something like You know, it's like from technical perspective, you can think of things how they could sense that. And that leads to this question of growth hacking, Tim. Is this a bad word now? Because growth hacking was very cool about like 3 to 5 years back. You know, people put it on LinkedIn, I'm a growth hacker, which meant I will cheaply get you into spaces, right? Are we saying that if people talking about themselves as a growth hacker today, that's actually a red flag.

Yes.

That's a simple answer. It's just like, yes. It's like, yes.

Yeah.

Okay. So you can't be a, you can't be a growth hacker and be ethical and using white, white type of strategies. It's just not possible.

I believe it's possible, but it's become a dirty word. There's really no doubt about that. And even the practices you say, some people need a history lesson. And that's what my book, I guess, ended up becoming. You know, I think it's like chapter 16 or 17 of my book is called Instagress Alternative Alternatives. And the idea was once this powerful software as a service platform called Instagress got shut down, the Google search term Instagress alternative exploded in popularity. It's still an expensive keyword to buy even today. Yeah, almost 10 years later. But one of those alternative strategies was Telegram-type engagement pods. So exactly what you said, um, that still happens for posts. That was a known thing, um, on Instagram basically 10 years ago. And the issue with these is that once the engagement group goes beyond a very small group, like, of course, even when I'm promoting my book, I have groups of friends where I'm like, hey, come on, like, you shoot me a like. The problem is that if I commoditize that engagement, mm-hmm, then I can probably sell it. And then that becomes a problem where you have this shadow market of like this unfair boost that you get to everything. So that's one aspect of growth hacking. And I think generally we do look down on people who say that today because often it means breaking terms of service or just disrupting other users of the platform.

Yeah. I do agree it doesn't lead as well to real understanding of where you actually sit within the market. I feel like as a, you know, as a founder or as a business owner, you really won't understand what are the real terms of you participating in that, in the sense of what you're getting. Like, I'm putting all of the money, I'm putting all of that time, how that translates to whatever I care about. And just getting likes on a fake mode I mean, it's a fake, right? Like, you're probably not— not probably, you're not going to convert any of these likes to any business because it's not real likes. It's just a fact. It's just a number. So for me, it was always, you know, like my mindset was always like, I'm just going to be lying to myself. Like, yeah, I'm doing well, you know, like, nah, no, like it's not real. Which leads me to this question, Tim. What about AI tools right now? Content? Blogs, you know, few prompts with ChatGPT, hundreds of blogs. Uh, I've seen tools for LinkedIn which leaves comments, just reads your, your content, leaves comments, which seems like adding value and relevance, that they're just filled with AI, especially around generative content. It's just gonna be so much fake. It's gonna be more fake than it's gonna be more real. Like from your perspective as a software engineer and then knowing all about the algorithms, what, what do you think social media are doing about this? And Google as well.

Generative AI is a big problem. I think what it's laid bare is that many people are not comfortable reading, and they're also not comfortable writing. We have a lot of content creators who now need, uh, AI to write anything for it to seem as compelling as their peers who might be using AI. And, uh, for me, as like a— first of all, a very cynical person, but also an experienced reader, It's quite obvious to me. Um, since I published the book, I've gotten dozens of emails that are clearly written by AI. Yeah, I've also paid for services related to my book promotion and, um, reviews where it's obvious AI has been used, at least in part, at least for vocabulary generation around the terms people use to describe my book. Uh, overall, I think that we're going to see more usage of it, especially as, as the younger people go through school with this unbridled access to AI, to the extent that they never will grasp the same level of reading comprehension that you or I have. As far as AI in the non-generative sense, like actually meaning like artificially intelligent, like able to respond to, you know, somewhat ambiguous situations. To an extent, the system that I built at Shark Social, which I called Mako, and then version 2 was called Mako 2, it was AI in the primitive sense, in that I was able to generate and spin topics for comments that I left. I was able to intelligently target different accounts based on the chances of them, uh, following back or engaging back, and In a way, I had the capability to incorporate machine learning into navigating bot detection methods. Never fully automated, but these were capabilities I had even back in 2020. When we think about these pre-trained models and these very advanced, basically taking a foundational model and then using it, of course, for built-for-purpose stuff, there's usefulness everywhere. But when people say, Hey, this would have been super useful to you at Shark Social when you were trying to drive these engagements. I kind of laugh because it wouldn't have been, and the comments likely would have been less engaging or more confusing. If you remember the era on Instagram, a lot of the comments we were generating were pretty basic, but we'd say nice one, best one yet, you look great, and sometimes because we did not have computer vision, we didn't, or we did not have awareness of what we were commenting on. Sometimes there was a miss. So then maybe we would only use the fire emoji or the thumbs up emoji to get the context beyond what's in the description of the picture, which is usually not even helpful at all. You would need to then pull what the image contains and get some context analysis there. So that's helpful, but you don't need AI to do that. I think it's like pretty easy to come up with a rule set and certain ways of generating text to do it. So yeah, I'm just not a fan of AI and I find a lot of people rush to this end goal of AI, what it means for marketing, whatever, not realizing that a lot of these tools have already existed for a long time. And by using AI specifically for English language generation, you have this scarlet letter of people will know you're using it.

I love you calling this out, Tim, because I get these, uh, like a lot, uh, LinkedIn, uh, all the socials, emails as well, comments on the posts. And, uh, just like you, because I, because I use it every day from, for, for my own needs, I, I can sense that comment, uh, or that content like miles away. You, you read through it and you go like You know, not a real post, not a person have written post, AI have written post and actually made semi-viral, let's call it like this, post on LinkedIn where I basically stated that 90% of everything I see in my feed like reads like it has been throttled through ChatGPT and people, you know, sort of resonated with that like yeah, yeah, yeah and some jumped into defending the point of view going well, How else would you compete in the space? Which is like interesting dilemma then, right? It's like, okay, well, you want to be in the space because the space provides a lot of value. And if everyone using the tool in the space, which is the automation and AI content generation, if you're not using effectively, do you actually have a chance? Like, are the algorithms being adjusted to give the real content a more boost versus the content which clearly is AI generated? From your perspective, your point of view, Tim?

Yes, absolutely. It's, I would say, almost easier to compete. The unfortunate part is that more people who could not in the past like string two sentences together are now hitting post and publish much more often. So it comes back to a problem of saturation.

Okay.

But with my content, even on my newsletter or even my blog, which is a lot wilder and unedited, there's a unique opportunity for people to develop their own voices. And I think it would be pretty clear to anyone reading my book, you would know within the first chapter, and most people have said this, they're like, hey, even in the disclaimer, I realized that this was a book I needed to read. On Amazon, you have thousands of books published every day, and AI/low-content books are becoming such a problem that even last week, Amazon announced like hot or lower royalty rates for like shorter books. And they're banning a lot more accounts because people see this like content milling strategy as a way to, uh, to promote stuff. So yeah, it's, it's unfortunate because I think it has eroded the opportunity for someone, somebody to even be in high school or to be starting out in college, getting a feel for writing. Like, how do I write compelling content on the internet? Long form, short form, social media or whatever. The issue is that a lot of these people will simply burn out before they can really find traction or find their voice now that they are faced with AI. But I could compare anything I've written, and obviously my book is, my book is over 100,000 words, to anything AI. And at least as far as today, which is in 2025, AI isn't even close to matching my voice and what I've written, especially using a professional editor. So that's kind of the upshot is that for talented writers it gives you more. But if you do not consider writing to be your, you know, your main skill, I don't think it's that bad to use AI. It's just that we end up with a lot of sentence structure, vocabulary and things that at this point, right, everybody's sick of. It's very iterative.

Yeah, I do agree. And as well, talking about launching books on Amazon, I got at least another set of courses. Like I mentioned, I love knowledge. I love these courses, uh, which I literally goes launch a book on Amazon in 7 days. And, and it basically goes like this: found a niche, found a problem people care about, uh, basically validate the intent, use ChatGPT to write the book, you know, target 150 to 200 pages book, put it on Amazon, self-publish, boom, here you go, you're getting some royalties now. In a nutshell, right? And, uh, when I saw this, I was like, I'm gonna start buying books now. It's just like, they're all gonna be, you know, just the same basically concepts or the same knowledge you can get on ChatGPT. Feels like it. So people will need to develop some type of skills of understanding where a real knowledge and experience are being put within the book. Anyway, it's just, uh, same things you can find online, just put in, uh, under one umbrella of a topic of a book. That's a good shout. I love you calling that one out. Right. So, um, so let's come back to that automation a little bit, Tim. So it's not evil by, by, by its sense, right? Because automation is, is everywhere. You as a software engineer, you probably build many pipelines to automate your own workflows. So automation, when it comes to managing social media, that's That's a huge efficiency boost like that. You know, that's a, that's a leverage you want to use. But then it, it becomes this question of how you actually use it to not get in problem or in trouble. So first question is, to your knowledge, does social media allow automation? And if not, how, how do you use it safely? Should you even, should you even be using it at all then?

To my knowledge, in 2025, Automation in the general sense is forbidden by most social media platforms. Okay, this has been a reversal from a lot of the earlier, uh, you know, the earlier terms that we saw where Twitter actively encouraged people to create bots and kind of these like workflows for automated posting. Uh, Reddit has like a still a fairly robust like user-created bot community subject to some guidelines. Um, but a lot of these early 2010s tools that we saw such as like TweetDeck, things that people were using as kind of like this control layer to do things like post scheduling, do some types of lead generation and stuff. A lot of those have been forbidden and they've, if not forbidden, they've been much harder to harness now because these APIs that were previously quite open. So the ways that a developer could interface with a social media account have been completely closed off. So not only is it against the terms, but it's also much harder to automate many of these, these workflows. But to, you know, to give a shout out to your earlier point, for whatever reason, there are a lot of services on LinkedIn now offering these types of automation tools. However, in my book, I look at one of the earliest cases called Haikyuu Labs and they reached a settlement with LinkedIn for using LinkedIn data for commercial purposes. So I can say that there is in many cases a precedent for pure automation being against the terms because it's a nuisance. Pure automation being against the terms because some judges have found that it violates the common law of trespass if access has been restricted in the past. And then in any case where data is being mined to improve the automation solution or to sell us product on the side, that every court at this point has pretty much found that to be illegal.

So we're saying that the tools which takes LinkedIn data and sells it as their own tool is effectively in breach of something and they should not exist in the first place.

Yeah. Yes. And it's been coming up a lot. You're not the first host to mention it. I've had friends and business associates mention it to me as well. And I say, Uh, this is chapter 9 in my book called Punishing Crime. I addressed the Haikyuu case. The Haikyuu case has kind of been lost in the shuffle of, uh, all the social media news, but it was significant enough to have its own Wikipedia page. And I think it's really, really interesting, uh, to look at. Most of these tools are violating LinkedIn, uh, types of, types of terms. And I admit I'm the bad guy. I've created and I've been paid to create LinkedIn tools in the past, just many, many years ago.

Yeah, they're so— I mean, honestly, they are on every corner when it comes to LinkedIn especially. And the technical implementation is actually quite simple, is that if you have a LinkedIn paid tool such as like Sales Navigator, which is not that expensive, it's something like $70 a month, I think. You're actually getting in the backend of LinkedIn, and at that point in time, you're gonna see a user's email address, and you're gonna see a lot more information. I mean, mainly you want the email address if you're talking about cold outreach, phone numbers as well if you're leaving. And these tools just simply, you know, they simply go through the search results and they just scrape that information as a frontend browser extension type of tools, right? And I feel like if people are using your tool to scrape that information, right? So, so your account is in potential being banned or shadow banned because you're using that through your account. The tool itself is relevant at this point in time, so you risking your account, but the data you actually getting, you're giving back to that whatever the tool you're using. So their database is growing of information of your network, of your people, and eventually they accumulate such a big databases that they start selling those. And Apollo.io is probably one of the biggest tools which you can see online being used for lead generation. As an example, if you go to YouTube and put in like lead generation, like Apollo will come in probably like 7 out of 10 videos, which to me was always like, I mean, come on, like we all know that's from LinkedIn, right? It's like, how can you be live? Like how can you exist as a business? So it's very interesting you saying that this case exists. I'm not sure why would LinkedIn not go after these tools. I mean, they technically speaking, they could probably sense that you're using these tools. So again, from your perspective, Tim, do you think LinkedIn knows that you're using these automation tools and they just don't care, or do you think it's actually not provable, uh, to a 100% extent so they can't actually do anything about this?

There are two issues. One is automation in a way that may create a nuisance on the platform. Number two is the data scraping, commercializing the data, and potentially brokering the data. The second case is much stronger because courts have pretty much found that this is some form of essentially copyright infringement, even under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So this is the biggest issue where courts have basically found that scraping for personal use isn't necessarily illegal, which is an important precedent. But they found that whenever you use that data for commercial purposes, that's not allowed. That's illegal. You can, you know, damages could be leveraged against you. Third case that I give in Chapter 9, uh, is with Radpad. Probably nobody, nobody remembers what Radpad is, but it was one of those like mid-2010s real estate apartment aggregator things. And these places were really pesky because you would maybe search for, hey, like apartments in Chicago, and you would get the big, you know, the big listings. And then you would have these couple other sites that, that somehow found their way into search rankings and had all the same images.

Yeah.

And what Radpad was doing was they were scraping Craigslist, and, uh, Craigslist came after them and said, you can't do this. They basically ignored the order and they were effectively shut. By the time the court precedent was established, I think the company had already gone out of business. But that established that you cannot build a platform on the scraped data, which if you remember 10, 15 years ago on apartment websites, it was just, you know, stealing data from one place, going to another.

Yep.

They also found that the damages were possible reputationally because if Craigslist manages the listings pretty tightly, if somebody leases an apartment, it will be taken off the market. But one of these secondary sites might not have the same incentive to do that, which then results in like unnecessary calls or inquiries getting made to the landlord. Uh, so I make the case, hey, I, I can see where they're coming from. This is definitely not cool. Uh, so now that we see this, uh in the data brokering space. Yes, LinkedIn slash Microsoft, like, they must be aware of this. They know it's happening. To prove that it's happening, um, as we get to these, you know, you have RocketReach, you have a million, um, lead generation services. The ugly fact is that most of them have acquired their data in ways that violated terms of use. And that there now, at least today, exists legal precedence that means that they might be liable. Unfortunately, to prove where the data is coming from is very, very difficult. You almost have to insert types of like fingerprinting into the data, which is very, very difficult. You have to, like, for example, add random periods to somebody's email address to confuse the scraping system, something like that. It's very, very difficult. And I think that's the main thing. The other issue is that as more of this data is brokered and scraped from one place to another to another, it becomes what was even said in the Instagram growth space, which is a game of whack-a-mole. So you shut one down, they'll reskin, they'll be selling the same data next week. It's actually very difficult to snuff out.

Hmm. So in theory, then they would likely want to do something about this, but In practice, it's not that simple, and likely they're not doing anything about this because to the points you just mentioned, Tim, it would be, would be a lot, not a lot, but it would be just hard to do anything about this. So how I think about these automation tools, especially which goes against the terms, if we're talking about LinkedIn, probably applies to other social platforms as well, is that If banks using fraud protection AIs and algorithms are able to, uh, detect fraudulent activities at a very, very high rate, I'm like, why can't you use the same tech to detect bot activities or scraping activities on your platforms? And I'm like, I don't know, like, there's probably no reason. So I would assume they use that, which for me leads to believe that they know they're using automation tools at any point in time you actually want to use one. So from technical perspective, do you believe it's actually possible to trick, not like trick, but to use a bot in such a way that it feels like it's a human?

Yeah, Mike, that's a really good point. And especially considering financial fraud, it does seem that there's quite good enforcement of this, even to the extent that, you know, you or I, we've probably had payments blocked as fraudulent even though we weren't committing fraud, right? It's actually, in some cases, it's, it's a little bit, um, of an overreach. Those systems work really well and they're trained on a ton of data, um, and I'm, I'm happy they exist, right? It makes the internet a better place. So why don't we see more of this on social media platforms? I think that there's a lot that goes into it, but it really comes down to ease of use. So it's this balance between ease of use and how user stickiness would change if they were served a CAPTCHA every 5 minutes, right? Right. So that, that would make botting at least more expensive, if not impossible for some. But it would also decrease the use— like, the user experience would be impacted.

Yeah.

And that's the— that's like what we're seeing in a lot of cases. I would give an example on YouTube. I listen to a lot of podcasts now that I'm interviewing on many of them. And I sometimes reach out to hosts, not even to say I want to be on your podcast, but even to say, hey, maybe down the road, or you should talk to my friend, whatever, just to make these connections. I've noticed that when I'm trying to get email addresses from YouTube, not only do I have to solve a CAPTCHA, but once I do it 4 times, in a day, I then get locked out. It says, hey, you can't get any more email addresses today.

Yeah.

So I think for some of these, uh, it's probably much better to, um, to lock them up. And I think LinkedIn has various tiers of payment where you can then say, okay, well, you're not premium, so you're done for today, or you don't have Sales Navigator, you're done for today. Um, at least they're extracting some money, uh, you know, out of people who are doing it.

Yeah.

In the more general sense of like nuisance behavior, uh, two chapters in my book address this at length. Um, there— it was such a long chapter that I had to split it up. So it's called Safeguarding and Shadow Bans, Part 1 and Part 2. And as the title suggests, one of the tactics you could use is you could shadow ban someone, uh, you know, to prevent them from engaging in spammy behavior. But also I address something that hasn't really been captured in, in writing, in, in like a book formally, which is the concept of trust score. And it underpins a lot of detection from fraud in bank transactions to just disruptive behavior on social media sites. And I think trust score is really, really important for that reason, but it's also this topic of fascination because nobody knows what comprises Trust Score. We have some idea of like, okay, if an account is 5 days old, it's less trustworthy. Okay, if it was created in India but it's logging in in Brazil, okay, less trustworthy. If it hasn't posted a picture yet, if it only has 5 friends, if it only— like, there's all these metrics that we can use to identify, uh, to identify this. But ultimately, I, you know, I don't know. It's really, really hard. And I think it's this trade-off between UX and whatever else.

So I'm quite sure I'm shadowbanned. So I really want to talk about this because what I did, and it's pure accident, I have a VPN installed on my machine and I switch VPN for various reasons like, you know, streaming TV shows and things like that. And I forgot I was VPNed. So I went into LinkedIn, right? And I logged into LinkedIn while I was not from my home, as in I was through the VPN. And it instantly went like, your account has been hacked. Uh, you need to go through the verification. I was like, well, okay, you know, I'm coming from an IP they didn't see before, which is very similar to financial fraud, is that if you're making a payment you never made from a place or a country that looks suspicious, that's an anomaly which gets flagged. So I was like, that's fine. So I'm doing through this and they go like, no, no, no, you will send your ID now. And, you know, and it was quite heavy. And I was like, oh my God, you know, I need to send my documents. I got verified and everything. But after that point, anything I post has like 10 times, about 10 times less impressions.

Wow.

Right. And I sort of went to them. I was like, that can't be coincidence. Like, like, like, come on, guys. Like, that can't be a coincidence. So can you explain me? I, I, Got no answer whatsoever. Just case is closed. You, you, you back, you're back in the system. We don't want to talk with you anymore, which sort of leads me to believe that, look, algo does what it does. As a support team, like, we're not even gonna engage in conversations because we probably don't even know why algorithm acts like it acts. But I assume that I got, you know, sort of shadow banned, which leads me to this question. Did you ever worked on a case system or, you know, how can I go back into that good light? Like, is it just purely like what you mentioned about that, uh, uh, healthy score or a good score, or like just doing my own thing, just posting, interacting, and just hoping one day I'll be back in a, you know, good light of the algorithm? Or am I just doomed forever on this account?

I don't think that it's a coincidence. What you identify is one of the main, uh, indicators of like disruptive or dishonest behavior, which is weird because I use VPNs too, to— you're right— to sometimes watch like certain sports on YouTube, especially running. Um, and then I log into other sites and I immediately get CAPTCHA or I get, get blocked in some way.

Yeah.

So yeah, this is a problem. And the unfortunate part about Trust Score is that it would be extremely expensive for you or I to set up a system that can help us understand like what's really going on. And also it's very difficult if we believe our reach has been limited, how to really know that. So you have some statistics there, right? You can say, okay, well, I maybe used to get, you know, 10,000 impressions per post and now I get 1,000. That's noticeable for sure. But there's no guidebook, as you notice, there's no guide on how to get it back or why it happened in the first place. And that's a huge problem that it can be overzealous and then you have to face the consequences of not having— you didn't do the wrong thing, you just didn't switch over your VPN. So it's a big problem and it's something that people came to us at Shark Social a lot on Instagram and said, am I shadow banned? Am I shadow banned? And the truth was, in many cases, yes, they were, and they were shadow banned because they used our service. Uh, but even for us, we didn't have a great way of identifying shadow bans as they happened or helping people get out of the dungeon, so to speak. It's just not well, not well explored. And I'm sure you've also Googled solutions to this and you just have either complete nonsense blogs or people trying to sell you things that don't really exist. So unfortunately, there's no known remedy for it. And if somebody does claim to have the answer, that answer could change tomorrow.

Yeah, it's one of these lessons, isn't it? Is the social media companies, they, they, they can be transparent with, with what the algorithm does because everybody would just start gaming it, right? So it's never going to be an open book. People who use it at scale, maybe agencies who manage a lot of accounts, they try different different campaigns, A/B testing and things like that. So they sort of have a sense of what works. So it becomes their information, which effectively becomes their edge as a business is that, yes, look, we have been achieving results for our clients consistently. We're not using any black hat tactics. We just know the content, how to post, why people engage and things like that. But if you get like tagged like that, yeah, no one knows how to recover from this. And the play I'm doing right now, I just stopped engaging. I was like, you know what, you tagged me, like you banned me, so you're sort of sending me a message, just stop, right? Because like, this is how I'm reading my message, you know, my impressions went from thousands to hundreds. I'm like, you're basically saying me that I should stop because you're not showing my content to anyone. So I'll go somewhere else. I'll show that content somewhere else, right? So, so I'm just like, I just stopped sort of like posting and I'm like, I'll come back in the I don't know, 6 months and, you know, see maybe somehow I get my score renewed in the algorithm sense. But you're actually right, like, I found no answers about this and it basically leads to these conclusions that just don't play, like, just use the system as it's intended to be used, here's the terms. If you try to gray area hack it or black hack it, it might just lead to you losing all your effort to grow that account, you know, it might be like looking good in the beginning, but effectively if you get shadow banned or banned, all that effort is lost, right? Like literally.

Okay, so yeah, I think shadow bans have been really interesting because a ban is very hurtful and it triggers this emotional response where then almost every single person who gets banned even if they know they're doing something wrong.

Yep.

They're probably going to file a ticket and they're going to try to call Facebook and then realize Facebook doesn't have a phone number.

Exactly.

What's, you know, what's unique about shadow bans is that it takes a while to figure out, and then you realize you're kind of stuck. So engineers at Meta did publish a blog post where they addressed the topic of shadow bans. I cover this in my book briefly, but it's essentially like a there's no usefulness in the blog post at all. It doesn't really say, here's what we do, here's why we do it. It's just like a very broad post to satisfy the masses, right? But for people like you, people who understand like what it means and the implications of this, the finer points, there's nothing out there. So I can sympathize with what happened to you on LinkedIn.

Hmm. Ah, sad story. It's okay. It's okay. I feel like there's a lot, uh, there's so many social media that you can explore, uh, the message you want to send and the content which resonates with your, with your potential customers or people in just so many different areas. But LinkedIn is unique in the sense of B2B relationship, right? Like, um, ultimately you can always do the work which is, uh, just going and having conversations with people, right? Like If you're posting just the content for the sake of viewership, which we covered in the beginning of the episode, it's, it's, it's just the wrong strategy to begin with. If you go to LinkedIn for influence or relationship building or closing deals, you will end up in the DMs anyways, and you will end up probably in meetings face-to-face or phone calls. So ultimately, you know, the shadow banning is, is just about that content reach. If that's caught your system or your process, that will be very, very painful. It wasn't caught for mine, so it's okay. So which leads to this question, Tim. So we sort of covered a couple of cases like data scraping, buying followers, buying comments, being part of a pod engagement. And I feel like these are a little bit like gray area. Because the systems can prove you doing that. As a result, people use it because it gives that edge to them. So it feels like it's just a tactics which won't die. Let's put it like this, which leads to a question. What would you recommend to stop to businesses like today? Like what are tactics which you feel like very poor or very bad from a sense that if you're going to get flagged on that, you just basically lost the business?

It's very difficult, uh, because we can't know for sure what the consequences certainly are. Like, we can't know with certainty what will happen, okay, if you go too deep into the gray area. But I think one of the classic examples would be buying followers. I think that's a classic one where there's a temptation, it's very cheap, and that social proof might fool enough people such that it has a positive impact on the business. I think the ironic part for me coming and having published this book, yet having a very small social media presence aside from LinkedIn, is that I could have used all of these tactics. I mean, I'm a master. I know exactly how to do it. I know, I just, I could have done everything and I could have been coming onto these podcasts, pitching these podcasts. Easily with 200,000, uh, followers on social media and all types of ways to hack my growth, especially on Instagram, because I know that the best. And I didn't do that, and there's a reason I didn't do that, and that's because like I have a value system that says I hate what I saw on this platform, and I hate that people— I, I hate the way that it undermined the development of actual talent. Uh, so what the advan— like, the advice I give to businesses, uh, is in one chapter, which is a very cynical chapter in my book, but it's called Getting Good. And it's this concept borrowed from video games, which I think now applies to the social media space, which is that it's everybody's fir— like, every day is somebody's first day on social media. You're never going to be the best. The influencers you see today, you will never surpass. But it gives you a great way to learn from these people and to develop talent in your own way. So my advice to businesses of things they should or shouldn't do is, first of all, you probably shouldn't buy followers or go down any of these paths that don't involve working with a real, above-board, expensive agency. If you can't afford the agency, just do it yourself. If doing it yourself is taking time away from mastering your craft, then you probably also shouldn't be doing that. So I think a lot, for a lot of people, it's, it's that if you want to be a professional speaker, you should spend more time speaking. If you want to be a violinist, go play the violin. A lot of things that it's just based around scraping, I find to be a waste of time and a waste of like what the human mind is really capable of.

Okay, I love you calling this out. I mean, effectively We're just repeating an old message that if, like, there's no shortcut to success, basically that's what we're saying, right? Like, if you want to be big on any of those social medias, if you want to be influential over there, if you want to get a trust-based following which you can then convert to make a business and make clients, there's no tool, right? There's no AI, there's no automation that it will give you that. It might give you an edge in a sense of like efficiency if it's an automation tool, but the content you put out, it needs to be yours. You need to be getting better at that content. You need to be engaging with your followers yourself, not automated comments, and just, just rinse and repeat until the point you actually reach that level where people go like, oh great, that's a great piece of content, you know, here's a like, or here's my comment. The tools will just not solve you that. And if you go with that because it's just easy and we all love success quick and easy and cheap, you're probably just going to end up in a worse situation, right?

I agree. I just think a lot of time has been wasted. And even today, right, as we, as we speak about this and the other example is that when it does come to podcasts, I've had some podcasts say, hey, we'd love to have you on, but it's going to cost $5,000. And I'll say, well, okay, that's a lot of money. Like, let's really do my research here. And I can see where, yeah, in some cases the production quality is pretty good.

Yeah.

But then when they give me their roster of the prominent guests they've supposedly had on, I can tell where they paid for those guests and where, like, the conversation is just completely meaningless. And you just see that we have a lot of these just vectors of deception, even in the podcasting space where I, you know, like I really wanted to talk to you for like 2 months now and I've like really looked forward to this day. I understand that in some cases, you know, money could change hands for different podcast appearances.

Mm-hmm.

But also we should look for things like the conversation we're having now, which is the organic, authentic aspect, not like, oh, you should come on here because I've had X. And there's one guy who's like a very known, very well-known— you can pay him however much, he'll come on your podcast and you can say you've had him. And I just wonder if it's all worth it, you know. To me, it doesn't really help with the craft. And frankly, a lot of these people could probably take some lessons on how to speak, how to ask questions, how to actually prepare for an interview, how to actually, you know, do things in a way, you know, in this ad hoc manner. So yeah, that's my— that's the rant about podcasts. But I think it relates to everything you're saying about businesses.

Yeah, 100%. And I mean, it's great you're calling the podcast scene— I could add to this. So a lot of numbers are fake as well. You know, podcast is— it's very difficult to have a successful show in the first place and it takes time. It's just the same what we just talked about. There's no shortcut to success and a lot of episodes die off after like 20 episodes, which is basically like 4 months, right? Like, statistically speaking, if you have a show which is more than a year, you are in the 5%, you know. If you have a show which is more than 3 years, you're basically in the 1%. It's, you know, the numbers are brutal because there's no money to be made in the podcast, right? Like, to, to be— to have a show for 3 years, you're gonna be just putting in money. And whatever is your reasons, hopefully those reasons, you know, are good, but That's why you see the shows trying to game the system, right? And for example, buying listens is a very— same as buying followers is a very common tactic because ultimately speaking, it's very hard to prove that those numbers are not real because when it comes to a listen, it's just about requesting, you know, audio file of a podcast.

Yeah.

That can be a bot, that can be an app. Everything can be fake. There's no, you know, there's no need to have an account behind that. So any sort of listen numbers sort of become quite whatever, right? Like, you know, it's very hard to actually know if there's an actual listener at the end of it, right? You get some reviews on, let's say, Spotify or Apple Podcast. Again, you can buy these, right? So ultimately, coming back to your point, you know, if you look at the show, you probably want to look at things like, you know, questions, you know, topics covered, if the conversations are engaging and things like that. On the buying guests perspective, 100%. For example, I know, uh, and this, this might be controversial from other sources, so I can't be 100% sure what I'm saying here, but I've been told that Diary of CEO, which is a very, very huge show, they buy their, their guests as well. They pay a huge amount to get these, uh, big people to come in on the show. But to, to that point though, is like The people are getting paid because their, their name brings money, right? So if you think about you being monetized on YouTube, people gonna look for your name because you, uh, for whatever person you are, famous, famous person, for whatever reason you're a famous person. So people will look for your name, they're probably gonna land on your show, uh, they will probably, you know, listen to you in that show, and that show will get, you know, will, will get the money. So you want to go like, look, I know you're gonna make money from, from me being on the show, so you probably need to pay me for me to come on the show. So it's just that economy, how it constructed itself, and people you're asking to pay to come on the show, you know, it depends. To your point, it depends.

It does depend, right? Because I can't sit here with a sense of entitlement, like I wrote one book and I've sold like almost 1,000 copies. That doesn't mean that I'm this extremely sought after guest, right? It's just like, you know, in a lot of cases it makes sense that it's like a one-to-one. We're just, you know, we're happy to speak with each other. And of course I don't wake up in the morning and think, why hasn't Joe Rogan answered my email yet? Right? Like, you know, like there's, there's some differences here. Yeah. And it's the same with what we see in the more broader influencer marketing space, which is of course, if this person especially does then promote the podcast to their followers. It's no different from advertising. So I don't mean to cast like and say like, oh, it should all be free, it should all be one-to-one, but there's a lot of stuff there that I can tell it's coming on the back of totally fake metrics of YouTube videos that get 5 views and then apparently I'm supposed to pay, right? So it's, it's, it's weird. I mean, everything's a hustle and I can relate to it, but I think in the podcasting space, it's been totally, totally, you know, I've learned a lot and I'm sure as the host, you know, even more.

Yeah, it's well known because I'm a host and as well a guest, you know, on other shows. And as well, there's a lot of VR companies, you know, sending guests. So you know how their business model works as well. And there's a lot of pitching platforms which came to light. So there's definitely, you know, economy behind it, which sort of fuels itself. And you're absolutely right, there's dodgy gamers in the space, and there's, you know, people who try to honestly make something out of their shows. So I'm just cautious about the time, Tim. Let's go into rapid questions. We love at the end of the show just to do very quick 30-60-second questions, hopefully to cover more about You know, the topics we were discussing today. Ready?

Yeah.

All right. What's one growth hack you regret inventing, but you still admire how well it worked?

It would have to be follow unfollow. I did not invent the practice, but follow unfollow means I follow you or I like you, and I expect at a rate of roughly 10%, uh, the likes or follows I dispatch, I'll get back. That underpinned the entirety of the Instagram organic growth industry. And it works extremely well even today, as I'm sure you, you've realized on other platforms. Whether it's I leave a comment, pretty good chance they're going to interact back with me. I see it on Strava even, which is a fitness app. Um, but unfortunately it does create these weird transactional relationships. Um, and these, uh, if automated, it does cause a lot of disruption.

Okay, so we're saying I will go follow you because you will see that I follow you. You will be like, hey, Tim's not a nice guy, I will follow back. And then when you get that follow back, you unfollow the person you followed eventually.

Yes. So yes, you enter into this implicit contract, which in my book I explore. In MySpace, it was an explicit contract. So you would actually follow someone and say, or friend them and say, hey, friend for friend, comment for comment, picture comment for picture comment.

Okay.

Now these contracts are implied.

Yeah. Okay. I get you. And then you just clean up your followers and it looks like you have, if 10% is remaining, you basically just get a number and then you don't follow yourself to anybody. Okay. I see that. That's a nice trick. I need to put that down. Jokes aside. All right. Is virality a sign of quality or just a side effect of good timing?

Uh, I think timing and also to some extent originality, but not originality in the, the best sense of the word. Often it means people are, I, I would say, compromising their values and ethics to create content that is more shocking or disruptive or, um, that sows discord perhaps. Uh, so yeah, virality, I think today is— we have this entire swath of influencers who have come up creating content that is borderline offensive.

Yeah.

So yeah, timing is part of it, but also part of it is just creating things specifically to be attention-grabbing, which I'm not a fan of.

Yeah, just, just almost trying to game people's psychology in a way, isn't it?

For sure.

Yeah. How do you call these people? Is it like psychopaths or narcissists or something like that? It is definitely like psychological definition when, when people understand how your brain ticks and they try to game that for their own advantage.

I guess these are growth hackers, uh, in a way. But, but really, but, but it's, it's funny because do we think of them as people who are good at harnessing the algorithm, or are they people who are created as a byproduct of the algorithm? And I'm more in the latter camp where I'm thinking these people wouldn't exist. Like, they would just be a guitarist, uh, in the past, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago. But now they're like the guy who does a backflip off a building into— right? Like, just doing more dangerous things, doing things that are shocking, doing things, you know, in the broader realm of adult content that I actually find objectionable. And a lot of times they realize that's their only shot, or that's their best shot. So rather than them being the manipulators, I actually think they've been so far corrupted by what they think it's going to take.

Yeah.

And the conspiracy would be that there are top-tier branding agencies, talent agencies that encourage this type of behavior.

Mm. I love that conspiracy. I can easily see that happening. People putting money to come up with these and then write these. I mean, honestly, some influencers I see which they come up in my feed. And I really protect my feed, by the way. I really don't click likes, uh, I, you know, I don't put comments, I don't follow something which is just not a value add to my brain and my time. But they still somehow, you know, get into my feed. And I would assume it's because paid, so they just get a slot of, you know, of my eyeball. So I just scroll fast by them. But I see majority of them as clowns because it's ultimately like, you know, they serve the same, uh, entertainment value you would get if you go to circus and you see, you know, someone performing, uh, dangerous acts, right? Like, that's entertaining by itself. And then you see clowns coming up and they're doing some funny stuff. Like, TikTok full of that. And, you know, for me, that's like, it's just that element. It's just like this clownish circus type of element. And I really hate when they come in my feed, cuz I usually, you know, look like AI automation, business growth and things like that. Like I'm, I'm giving that, you know, giving that content. I love that. Like, that's okay, cool. I, I learned something right now. You know, here's my like, you know, here's my comment. And then these clowns come in and I'm like, oh my God, dislike, dislike. And then they removed the unlike button, not unlike, uh, the dislike button. I didn't like that. Right. What do you think platforms secretly penalize but never admit in their guidelines?

This is a controversial one, uh, because it always comes up during election cycles in the United States where we even start thinking people who express certain political or just personal beliefs, uh, might be deprioritized, shadow banned to some extent, or I would say shadow banned at the micro, like the post level. Yeah. Um, I think that there's a lot of very weird stuff going on there. And, uh, there probably in the United States, like, is some more government conspiratorial stuff at this point where I would say because we have— there must be so much going on in the counter-terrorism space where they have certain ways of detecting behavior that might be related to, you know, just off people doing awful things.

Yep.

That same technology could very easily be used for mass censorship. Or mass surveillance of just dissenting opinions. So I think that that is happening. I just don't know to what extent. We like to set up an experiment that would— like, we just don't know whether it's just being tracked or whether it's actually being penalized.

Hmm. I feel like there was something. I think I want to say that I saw a video where Zuckerberg was in Congress answering questions, and it was acknowledged knowledge that they, they were forced to, to, to play with the data and what they're being shown in the feed. But that might be on a, you know, area of, um, of nobody knows, right? And that's effectively what the question is. Okay, that's a good take. I love that. And, uh, what's the sneakiest thing you have seen brands do to fake trust at scale?

I— so I think before the days of the FTC— so the FTC, like Federal Trade Commission in the United States— requiring, uh, promoted posts to actually have the disclaimer. Um, it was only fairly recently that that happened. And I think that what happened during the crypto, um, whatever you want to call it, like the crypto rally slash panic, when you had DJ Khaled, you had like tier 1 or whatever, tier 2 celebrities shilling crypto and other types of like very questionable investments to the masses. I would say that that was like probably the worst period of time ever on social media. And even though it's not— they weren't faking popularity, it was that the businesses were using popular people, many of whom were not including a disclaimer and essentially doing like pump and dump schemes.

Yeah.

Why this is bad is that You know, I worked in trading for almost 10 years. I have my Series 57, which is technically parked, but it's still active. The idea is that we have so much regulation to prevent these type of pump and dump stock fraud schemes that we saw in the 1990s. And the fact that so much of it was able to happen so rapidly on social media in the crypto space, uh, was a travesty. And I'm not saying I'm a fan of more regulation, but it really still to this day, I think, is a black eye on the crypto community and is a black eye on influencer marketing as we know it today.

Hmm. I was from technical perspective, I was involved as sort of like advisory with, with a handful of crypto projects and, and it was a sort of like a golden age in the sense that there was a lot of capital flowing around. To just sort of launch these projects. But how that capital came in, yeah, I do agree. That was very, very questionable. And seeing, you know, like Jennifer Lopez coming online and going like, buy this crypto or something like that, that was like, I mean, I get you got paid for an ad. I get that. Like you're just doing your job. You just, you know, you have been given a script, you're coming up and you're doing your job. You're just advertising, right? And you're hoping, that your legal team, you know, sorted out the contract so you're not doing something illegal by the things you're saying. But how all of that, yeah, unfolded in a sense of being people going like, you know, oh, I like her, she's telling me to buy, so I'll go buy now. And then, you know, all these apps just allowing this very simple ability to purchase. Yeah, yeah, this went— a lot of people lost a lot of money. And I think this, they It's still borderline. It's, you know, crypto is still so young, so young financially speaking. And tech is great, but from a perspective of like trading or financial exchanges, it's just wild, wild west, isn't it? Right. Which platform is the worst offender from your point of view when it comes to exploiting user psychology and why?

It has to be TikTok, and the reason is that there's widespread agreement that short-form videos are the most addictive. They, they hit enough of our dopamine receptors or whatever in, in the brain. And also TikTok gives you this unlimited feed of content, uh, in a way that Instagram actually doesn't. So TikTok has this like extreme version of autoplay where the videos keep going. But also if you create a fresh TikTok account, you'll have a ton of content that is oddly more relevant than if you create a basic Instagram account. Not saying you won't have anything in your feed on Instagram, but I think TikTok is worse because a lot of the content there, at least according to the Wall Street Journal exposés of about 2 years ago, was that much of it was very harmful to teenagers and those under the age of 18. So it was like, hey, We created new accounts and before we knew it, we were seeing softcore porn. We were seeing content that encouraged eating disorders and other harmful, like self-harm. And I mean, that's like basically a trifecta of things that are awful for teenagers. So I think that's the most corrupting for sure, mainly because the user base skews younger, but also because the content itself is unfortunately the most compelling.

Okay. Do you think social media detoxes actually work, or is it just, you know, PR?

I do. I hate using the term detox when you're actually not like detoxifying, but I think that taking breaks from social media and even from Reddit, even from using the computer— I've run experiments on myself. One of the books that inspired mine, you know, inspired my chapter, Screen Grabbing, in my book where I addressed a lot of these addictive behaviors. Um, the book was called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, I think, by Nicholas Carr. And the point of that book is that this was before smartphones. It was just kind of how, like, you know, we only have to think as far as knowing what to Google search and it'll answer it. Of course, now with AI, it's totally— it's much worse. And now with cell phones, of course, it's worse as well. Uh, but, but that's kind of how I, uh, how I see it all, is that The human brain is actually much more powerful. And the only way you can really realize this, this is, this is the controversial part, but if you read good books from the 1800s and early 20th century, you can realize what the human brain was capable of. The amount of information that was stored, like the fact that we actually had people who were like real polymaths who were like experts in multiple subject areas. Largely today that doesn't exist because of this information overload, because of very, very easy access to information. So I would say like read some books from the late 1800s, early 1900s, and spending less time on social media, actually doing the formal detox. I can feel it in my brain even. I can feel the difference in how I react and how my memory kind of snaps back. And even in terms of emotions as well.

That's great, shout out. I feel like you answered this one. You mentioned being addicted to manipulation in the book. What broke the spell for you? Was that the book you just mentioned?

Uh, it's a really complicated relationship I had because I say, hey, I was the villain, but during the course of the book, I make the case that maybe I wasn't a villain at all, or maybe at least writing the book was this act of penance where I'm saying Uh, you know, I, I'm a victim. Maybe I could play the victim card. Uh, for me, I definitely feel this addiction to browsing the web, to spending too much time on Reddit, to watching like YouTube videos in like an endless loop. And a lot of it is just because I grew up at a time where there were no safeguards for people like me. And now thankfully, when I grew up, the content was not that offensive or objectionable. Like, there wasn't like— it wasn't like everything was like softcore porn. Like, it really wasn't that way. Yeah, when I was a kid. But the difference is that as I grew up, like, as my brain was developing, also these addictive technology systems were gaining steam as well.

Yeah.

So for me, I think gaining back control is like admitting that it's not right, and that's like not how we, uh, we were built to use it. One of the original versions of Frame, I actually pulled a lot of content from rap songs and rap lyrics, and it was like by this rapper Big Sean, and it was something like, most of the girls I know are addicted to social media. All the time they spent, they could have wrote encyclopedias. Yeah, and it's such a stupid line, and I couldn't include any of the rap lyrics because of copyright reasons. But if there was one I was gonna keep, it was probably that because I realized if I stop using Instagram right now, I could probably write a great book about what I did. And essentially in the early '20s, I stopped using Instagram cold turkey, even though I was still like testing bots on it and stuff. Stopped using it personally, stopped scrolling, uninstalled it on my phone over 5 years ago. And what did I do? I wrote my version of an encyclopedia, right? I wrote a 400+ page book just with the time that I probably would have spent scrolling. Yeah. Or maybe would have spent scrolling. So yeah, in that way it was kind of this buildup that came out of realizing that maybe my usage was problematic.

Yeah, I love that. I use the phrase, what's your goal with this time on my wife? Because she, you know, she loves— I mean, I do as well. I allow myself myself either Friday evening or Saturday evening to go, you know, through the socials on YouTube. And my feeds are often about like AI and automation, Gentic AIs, and it's just like tech in general. But that's still very— it's like eating a pizza. Like, I love pizzas. It's like comfort food, you know, like, it's like a good burger with some fries and a Coke. Like, that's the feeling you get because all the dopamine discharges. So I sort of allowed this myself. When I, when I catch her doing that, which is not like, you know, on weekends, on dedicated sort of time, I'm like, you know, stop, look at me, like, what's your intention with this time? Like, why are you going through this? Like, what are you looking for? You know, what's the intention? And it's like, uh, exactly, close it. All right, because, because it's just, it's so easy to get sucked into it, and then you just, what it's called, like, you know, doomless scrolling, I think that's how you call it. You just go through it and you like Just stop and ask yourself like, what's my intention with this? It's gonna be none. And if it's none, you're just wasting your time, right? All right, what's one tactic you'd still teach a founder even if it's a little gray hat?

I would say that outreach and like personalized outreach is really, really important. And why I think this can get to gray hat is because I probably do subscribe to the belief that wherever you can get that email address from or wherever you can get that direct link from. Um, if you really have something to sell, if you really have something valuable, uh, that's how you break down the door. Meaning in some cases a cold email, that's gonna put you ahead of hundreds of people, but in other cases that person's email inbox is already going to be filled. So like, can you think of other ways to get to the, to get to the person? Um, I've used some like crazy, like I didn't want to say crazy tactics, but definitely things that would be labeled as like you ask a person who asks a person who might be able to get the book into the hands of the right person. Yeah, uh, I think that what we previously just called like networking and now we give all these ridiculous names to, uh, is pretty useful. And I think using the internet to aid in your search of how to reach someone in a way that's not totally invasive or like stalker-ish, uh, is fair game provided you're giving the person something of value. And for me When I think about Framed, there are a lot of people and a lot of very influential people who simply should just read Framed. So I'm not trying to sell them a course for $1,000, but I'm trying to give them a free copy of my book. And when you're a founder and you believe in something, you have to be willing to maybe find an email address where it simply doesn't exist, or you might have to actually like knock on that person's front door. And in some cases, I mean, literally.

I love spending extra time to get a warm intro. I mean, yes, cold outreach definitely works and you rightfully mentioned that it will put you above those who are not outreaching at all. But the warm outreach is actually not that difficult. Like if you have a like Sales Navigator on LinkedIn, you actually see the connection tree you need to go through to go to the person. It gives you 6 jumps. So it's it's very rare to not be able to find an angle to, to get to the person for a, for a warm intro. And it just works 9 out of 10 times. Warm intro works. And cold intros, I think, you know, conversions are like 10, 20%. So 2 out of, you know, 10, which is a high, by the way. So it's just worth thinking about how do I wanna, you know, spend my time with all of this and what are the results. Or success I'm looking for. Spray and pray, as they call it, when it comes to cold outreach is on paper, it actually performs worse than show me that you know me tactics. So there was this lady, I forgot her name. She has like a coaching or a business service. She worked for LinkedIn and she was constantly outperforming sales teams within LinkedIn, and she has attracted which he calls Show Me That You Know Me, which effectively is spending your time to understand your prospect. And then when you outreach, you use that understanding, use that personalization to open the conversation, and then the conversation is driven again by your knowledge about the person. And that actually performed much better than other sales teams which, you know, used what is called sales at scale, like cold outreaches, you know, cold DMs and stuff like that. So ultimately, if your end result is to close deals, not necessarily the cold outreach is a better tool. It just feels better because you're doing that en masse to hundreds. But if you can, you know, if you can close 10 by reaching out to 100 manually, would you still do it, you know, reaching out to like 10,000 if you're only closing like 7 in the same amount of time? Right. All right. Is building a brand online just performance art now?

Yeah, I think to a large extent, yeah, it is. Uh, it's become so saturated, and unfortunately many people see it as the first step of the journey. Uh, but for me, I think a lot of businesses today, you should focus on your craft or the product, and then social media comes, uh, comes later. Um, the way the expectations have evolved is, is kind of— yep.

It's so— Yeah, go Tim.

No, it's just been really rough to look at it and see so many businesses kind of— when you're starting a business, it's so exciting because you get to, you have a checklist, you get to work through the checklist. And for those first couple of weeks, every day you're going to tackle things and whether it's large or small, I think social media is a trap because so quickly you'll be able to come up with this list of, oh, do this on social media, get this picture, reformat my bio. And before you know it, it's just this cycle of kind of like you said, what is your purpose? What value are you providing compared to actually building your product? And so in a lot of cases it's bad and it's hard to say that it's the most important part of starting a business today. A lot of people see it as being important, but me or you, it's very much secondary to the actual product that they're putting out there.

We had a couple of people on the show as well who effectively built the business from social media. So they, they are founder-led businesses or services, and they effectively sharing the knowledge, or what is called build in public, or effectively just sharing the journey of them building things out. And that, you know, the, the, the lessons, the failures they're sharing on social attract eyeballs. And then effectively people go like, I've been following you for quite some time and I've seen you going from like 0 to 1 and 2. So I just want to work with you, whatever is, you know, the service you're selling or product you're selling. Clearly I'm following you because I care about that as well. And that's how they made a lot of business, you know, in that sense. So for me, that feels like a complementary journey, right? But at the same time, you see a lot of people who go like, okay, I'm going to become famous, right? Like I'm going to have a huge following. Then I'm going to shuffle this into a business which I'll create later, which is just upside down. It's so much easier to actually open a business, make some money, and then add socials later. And I can, I don't remember exactly the name, but someone on some other podcast, like fairly famous, literally said the same thing. It's just like people just take it upside down. It's so much harder to become famous and then build a business out of this, then actually build a business and then add that, you know, the socials at the end. All right, so are algorithm engineers, uh, the new lobbyists?

Yes, uh, in a way they can impact, uh, our emotions and our perception of many things, uh, in ways that are unimaginable. Even 15 years ago, that would have been unimaginable. So I think in my book I actually do some analysis of lobbying efforts by Meta, and I compare Meta's lobbying budget to that of Philip Morris, I think, which is a tobacco company. And it's something like Meta spends an order of magnitude more than a tobacco company spends on lobbying, or, or did over the last couple years. So that tells you a lot. But the odd part is that there's really no way to promote cigarettes in a way that you're going to be able to get more people in corner, right? Like, okay, you could change the packaging, you could try really hard with a specific ad, but people kind of know, like, a cigarette is a cigarette at this point.

Yep.

When we think about algorithm engineers, there's so much they could do slyly under, you know, under the hood to meaningfully impact how people perceive persuasive technology systems. And that's like the greatest superpower of all. As someone who I developed persuasive technology systems at a small social media startup, so we had no— nobody was looking to us to be the, uh, the thought leader in this space or to be the influencer in that space. But when we think about, uh, what large companies might be doing, it's very, very easy for them to create filters or these like micro shadow bans for content that does, uh, call out some of these controversies, um, specifically around like the sentiment, like, oh, what are they storing about me? How are they using my data? Is this addictive? Like, is this good to have in the hands of a child? Like, why is there so much softcore porn in my feed? Any number of these things could be whitewashed, minimized, censored by algorithm engineers. My optimism is that Nobody at one of these companies could have the singular power to affect an entire propaganda campaign. But if from the top they do dictate that certain things should happen, it can happen, and it can happen in a way that can meaningfully affect discourse and public opinion. So yes, algorithm engineers are the new lobbyists.

It's a very, very great answer. And now you were talking, I was thinking the keywords we mentioned in the show, I mean, the YouTube algorithm definitely gonna pick on these. So it's very interesting to see how this video will perform, because I remember reading somewhere that if the video has what is called like a blacklisted words, it just doesn't perform at all. Like you said, it just doesn't get promote it to, to any of your followers or any of their followers, even if it does well, because it sort of goes like, according to YouTube's algorithm, it goes like, I, I don't like what you're saying over here. So, so yeah, when you were talking, I was like, yep.

Yeah, I have high hopes for our episode, but I'll say this, even when I ran, uh, very basic ads for my book on different platforms, I actually was getting blocked and banned explicitly by certain ad platforms by using some of these blacklisted terms, even though I'm using them from the sense of critical analysis.

Yeah.

Than actually selling the services myself. But I think we'll be okay, Mike.

Yeah. Oh, well, to defend the point is like if you are the algorithm, right? So how do you know if it's, if it's from like a research and I invite you to a debate around this topic perspective, or if it's an actually like pushing some, some propaganda stuff, right? Like, as an algorithm, you don't really know the end product, right? Like, you don't have the book. So when, when someone buys an ad, you're like, I, I don't know what you're selling over here, right? So there's some element of like them not knowing and needing to just protect themselves, I guess. But let's see. Let's see how the video performs, Tim. Let's see. Right. So last question. Is community just a rebranded email list in 2025?

Yes.

Okay. You subscribe to this point. You're right. Yes. I got, I got another person in my books because I feel like communities right now. So, you know, it's big, right? Like Hormozy launched this school.com, and, and it just exploded. Like, I mean, they pushed it very hard, of course, but it's just like everybody's, you know, there. And I myself participate in a couple AI communities, and at some point I was like, this just feels like I'm part of the mailing list. So from your point of view, like you said, yes, but why, why, why yes?

I think what we've realized is that we can't trust any platform, uh, to actually preserve our content and our following.

Yeah.

So one day you could wake up and you're shadow banned. So like, what's the value of one of your LinkedIn followers now, right? It's, it's totally different. How do you actually reach out to one of your LinkedIn followers? I reached the same thing on Goodreads where I was a somewhat prominent Goodreads reviewer. I read like 200 books, I wrote reviews for all of them. I was like pretty well followed on the platform. Platform as far as book reviewers go. Then I found when I published my own book, I can't reach out to any of those people. I actually cannot send them a DM personalized and say, hey, I wrote a book, you want a free copy? I couldn't, I couldn't do that at all. So the point is that even where I thought I had reach and had like actually worked my ass off to build a huge community because I love books, um, I couldn't even send them free copies of my own, of my own book. Book. So I think what it all comes down to is that we just want an email list. And that's what I say is the greatest, like, safeguard against a platform, you know, banning you or you getting deplatformed, which I also address in my book, is having an email list. And that's where I've, I've kind of collected my persona as well. Like, my, like, longtime fan base, a lot of them are there. I've had people there for so long, they're wondering like, who is this guy? How am I even here? But that's kind of the value of an email list, right? Where if you do it the right way, um, whether it's 100 people or whether it's 10,000 people, um, that's the most genuine and that's what we want, right? We saw that very early on in YouTube where a lot of the creators started to get a little nervous about what was going on behind the scenes, so they created secondary channels. And I think a mailing list is really the secondary channel or the secondary platform that feels a lot safer.

Exactly that. I do agree. It's, it's, it's one of these steps. Like if you can get an email, get an email and, you know, have a newsletter or just have an email. Eventually, if something happens in your life, you can share with the person who gave you that email. The good midpoint is, is the community because effectively saying like, look, if you're going to be here, I, I don't need your email, so I'm not going to be like spamming you, but you're still going to be off the platform in which I, for whatever reason, might get shadowbanned or deplatformed. So I still gonna be able to interact with you as my fan, as my follower. So I love, I love you putting like that. All right, cool. So we covered a lot here, 90 minutes of, of many things you should not do, and as, as well points of view from Tim and, and me. Around the social media. So we said don't chase virality, actually think about the value you're providing to the network and your followers. Automation tools are good to some extent, but overusing, you're probably gonna dilute yourself, lose the trust with your followers, would— will go nowhere. Black hack tactics, buying followers, uh, comments, follow unfollows, and some other things, don't use ever. I know it's appealing, especially when you're getting bombarded by people from India selling you them quite cheaply. Think about the results you want to achieve with that number. Just having the number for the sake of having the number, unlikely is of value. If you're thinking to build business out of this, it's literally zero value. So really have an outcome of success in mind when it comes to socials. So now, Tim, people listening going like, I love what you're saying, how they actually get a copy of Framed and as well how they get in contact with you if they want to just have a conversation.

Framed is available on Amazon in both ebook and paperback format. It's also available for wide distribution, so you can also get it in Barnes Noble and other places. Those who are interested more in what I have to say, I do have a mailing list on Beehive. So it's timohern.beehive.com. And my long-form blog, which has been around for almost 10 years now, is tjohern.com. As far as social media sites, I'm banned from many of them, but I am on LinkedIn under Tim O'Hearn. I post there about, you know, about 3 times per month.

Excellent. So we'll have all of these in our show notes. So just scroll down, check them out. Do get the copy of Tim's book. It's an excellent, excellent book. I really enjoyed reading through this. It reminded me of these moments when I felt weak and I bought into some of these black tactics because again, it's so appealing, it's so cheap, and it feels like it's giving you results. It's not. I got burned in a couple of cases. So I really invite you to get the book. And as well, if this episode made you think, or you know someone buying and using these black tactics do share this episode with them. Would love you to spread the love. And if you enjoyed the show, of course, hit that subscribe button. Send us as well your biggest growth questions at masteringthegrowth.com. And as always, guys, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.