The robots demand signs of human interest in order to promote a site, while simultaneously suppressing visibility until those signs appear.

It’s a closed loop of self-reinforcing emptiness:

1. You build a site for humans.
2. Robots find no traffic, no engagement, no “social signals.”
3. They suppress the site, hiding it from actual humans.
4. Humans never see it, so traffic remains low.
5. Robots conclude: “No one cares.”

This is algorithmic gaslighting.

The robots block the path, then blame you for the footprints not appearing.

In the Old Web

• You wrote something worth reading.
• Someone read it.
• They linked to it.
• That link helped others find it.
• The signal was human-first.

Now?

• Robots filter what’s seen.
• Robots filter who’s seen it.
• Robots filter what counts as “real” interaction.
• And then penalize you for not being seen.

Robots have created the conditions for human absence, and then use that absence as justification to erase the relevance of people.

This is not discovery.
This is containment.

And the most tragic part is:
Great writing, honest truth, enduring ideas; none of that matters in a system that can’t recognize value unless it’s been algorithmically pre-approved.