350 founders are screaming into the same LinkedIn thread right now.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Three hundred and fifty comments, and climbing, from UK business owners who’ve done everything the LinkedIn playbook told them to do. Posted consistently. Shared value. Showed up. Been visible. Engaged with others. Done the work.

And their reward? Near-zero reach. Single-digit likes. The digital equivalent of shouting into a pillow.

(I wish I could say I was surprised. I’m not. I’m furious.)

Here’s what the thread actually reveals, underneath all the frustration: a consensus. A mass, collective realisation that “post valuable content” was never the instruction they needed. It was a comfortable lie sold by people who’d already built their audience and forgotten how they got there.

The data backs it up. LinkedIn’s own algorithm shifted in late 2025, and the numbers are brutal. Organic reach is down roughly 50% from the 2023 peak. Standard text posts are struggling to break 2% engagement. Views down. Follower growth cratered by nearly 60%. The platform introduced something called a “Depth Score,” which means it no longer cares whether someone tapped a thumb on your post. It cares whether they stopped. Whether they read. Whether they stayed.

A like is a polite nod from someone who kept walking.

A like is not a lead. It’s not a conversation. It’s not someone saying “I read your post and I want to talk to you.”

And yet. Every response in that thread, every piece of advice being lobbed at these frustrated founders, is the same recycled nonsense. Try carousels. Post at 7am. Use hooks. Engage in the first 60 minutes. Comment on bigger accounts.

Bollocks.

(Actual, genuine, steaming bollocks.)

None of that addresses the real problem. The real problem is that 350 brilliant people, people who run businesses, who employ teams, who’ve spent years building expertise that matters, are being told their content isn’t working because they haven’t found the right format. As if the issue is font size and not the fact that nobody taught them how to sound like themselves on a page.

The founders who are getting reach? They don’t sound like founders. They sound like people. They sound like someone you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party. They sound specific. They sound like they have a point of view, a personality, and a willingness to say something that might make half the room uncomfortable.

They don’t sound like a value post.

I’ve sat across from over 30 founders now. Ninety minutes each. Asking the weirdest, most seemingly pointless questions you can imagine. And every single one of them, without exception, has said something in that interview that made me lean forward. Something sharp. Something funny. Something real. Something that would stop a scroll dead if it made it onto a page.

It never does. Because somewhere between their mouth and their keyboard, corporate silence kicks in. Fifteen years of boardroom conditioning. The instinct to smooth every edge, qualify every opinion, strip out anything that sounds too much like a human being having a thought.

It’s evidence that the advice was always wrong.

“Post value” is the content equivalent of “just be yourself” at a job interview. Technically true. Practically useless. Because value without voice is just noise with better intentions. It’s a strawberry that looks perfect on the outside and tastes like absolutely nothing.

(I use that metaphor a lot. It keeps being accurate.)

What those 350 founders are actually experiencing is the gap between expertise and expression. They know their craft. They can explain it brilliantly in a meeting room. They light up in conversation. And then they open LinkedIn, stare at the blank post box, write something that sounds like everyone else, get 8 impressions, and close the tab feeling slightly worse about themselves than when they opened it.

The “Depth Score” change is actually, quietly, good news for people who have something real to say. LinkedIn’s own system is now built to reward the thing these founders already have in abundance: genuine depth. Expertise. Something worth reading twice. The platform is explicitly penalising shallow, generic, AI-generated content and boosting posts that make people stay.

Which means the answer isn’t more hacks. More templates. More carousel frameworks. More “5 ways to” posts that read like they were written by a committee who’ve never met the person whose name is underneath.

The answer is the thing that’s been sitting in their head for years. The stories from client calls. The opinions they’d never post because they seem too specific or too personal or too risky. The way they actually talk when nobody’s watching.

That’s the content.

And the fact that 350 people in one thread are all experiencing the same invisibility, all having the same crisis of confidence, all watching less qualified people get more visibility, tells you something important.

Your voice isn’t boring. Your container is wrong.

Every founder in that thread has the raw material for content that would stop scrolls, start conversations, and bring the right people to their door. They’ve got years of it. Decades. It’s in their meeting notes, their client calls, their late-night thinking, their rage about the industry, their quiet observations that nobody else is making.

It’s trapped.

And no carousel format is going to unlock it.

What unlocks it is someone who listens first. Someone who asks questions so apparently pointless that the founder says “I’ve got no idea what you got out of that.” Someone who doesn’t write for them but excavates from them. Someone who builds a voice file, not a content calendar.

I read that thread and I didn’t see 350 people failing at content.

I saw 350 people who’ve been given the wrong map.

The territory hasn’t changed. They’re brilliant. Their expertise is real. Their businesses prove it every day. The map just kept telling them to go north when the destination was west.

Reach is down. Fine. Good, even. Because the people still getting through are the ones who sound like actual human beings. And that’s a game these founders were born to win.

They just need someone to hand them the right map.

…or they can try another carousel template. See how that goes.

If that last line made you smile and wince at the same time, you might be one of the 350. If not, no drama. We’ll always have this moment.

Written by Sarra Richmond, The Ghost.

I write the posts your favourite founders get credit for. Find me → linkedin.com/in/meetsarra