Despite our personal feelings, none of the social platforms are broken. They’re working exactly the way they were built to work.

That’s the part that took me the longest to accept.

Remember my story about the gent who called me a few months ago with a question I couldn’t shake?

He’d been selling on the internet since the early eighties, had tried Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn, and had failed on all three. He wanted to know what he’d missed. The short answer is that none of those platforms were ever built to sell his thing. Or yours. The longer answer starts with what they were built for.

Before the internet, selling to strangers meant buying attention wholesale. A magazine ad, a radio spot, a billboard. You paid for reach, and the reach came whether the person cared or not. It was crude, but it was honest about what it was.

You knew exactly what you were buying and exactly what it cost. And the very effective figured out a way to do it face to face.

Then the internet arrived, and selling stopped needing a storefront or a door to knock on. It also stopped needing a human. It could happen everywhere, all the time. Every new platform that came along looked like a treasure chest thrown open to anyone willing to show up. It took me a couple of decades to see what that treasure chest actually was.

Not an opening. A gold rush. And like every gold rush before it, there were far more people who lost than people who struck anything at all.

The people who did strike something weren’t the hardest workers or the best writers. They were the ones who got there first, before the crowd arrived and the platform noticed how much money there was to be made off everyone else’s hope.

Here’s what that means in practice.

These platforms hold your attention and sell it. That’s the business. Sell it to advertisers directly, or, once organic reach stopped being generous enough to keep advertisers happy, sell the promise of that attention to the next person willing to pay for a course on how to get it back. Whether your book sells. Whether your offer lands. Whether the gent on the phone ever made a cent off forty years of showing up early. None of that was ever the platform’s problem to solve.

It was never in the business plan.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear all of this as “the platforms are designed to break us,” and that’s not quite right either. Designed to break us implies someone sat in a room and planned your failure specifically.

Nobody did.

What they designed was a business with absolutely no stake in whether you personally succeed. That’s a colder thing than sabotage, and in some ways worse, because there’s no villain to blame and no wrong turn to correct. The system runs exactly the same whether you thrive on it or quietly give up and go home.

You feel the far end of this every day, and so do I. My inbox is packed with people I’ve never met and will never talk to, all doing exactly what they were told would work, all fighting for a sliver of my attention I was never going to give a stranger anyway.

I catch myself wanting to hide from it. That’s not me being unfriendly. That’s the far end of the same gold rush, everyone mining the same low-yield ground at once, and all of us feeling it as noise instead of opportunity.

None of this means walk away from social platforms.

It means stop asking them to do a job they were never built to do. Their job is putting you in front of people who don’t know you yet. That’s it. That’s the whole job, and it’s not a small one. What happens after that, the part where a stranger becomes someone who knows and trusts you enough to pay you real money, was never going to happen on the platform itself. It happens somewhere else entirely.

So before you blame the algorithm again, ask yourself one honest question. What job have you been asking the platform to do?

This is the second of three parts on social media. Last week: who actually gets paid on these platforms. Next Sunday: where the sale really happens, and how to get there.