Yo! Welcome to the next episode of The Reeder where you get actionable tips and strategies for creating memorable content every Saturday.

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For most of my career, I shipped PDFs. Because a landing page was a dev ticket, and anything interactive was thousands of dollars and long timelines. So ideas either took forever to come to life, or they flat out never happened. 

Today that constraint is gone. I partnered with Lovable and built my first real marketing tool without writing a line of code.

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— Paste in your draft. Not a swipe file, not a template picker — it reads what you actually wrote and makes the same call I make when two subject lines both look fine and only one gets opened.

— Get your top pick and a handful of alternates back in seconds. They beat my writing more often than I'd like to admit.

Every good marketer has a process. The great ones are about to start shipping theirs as software. And you can do the same right now with Lovable. 

Build your first project →

The platform I've written on since 2017 — the one that built my brand, my business, and my reputation — slowly stopped responding to me.

Post after post, the stuff that used to work just... didn't. Reach dropped. What used to come easily became a struggle. Every day, I carried the nagging feeling of pounding my head against a wall I couldn't see.

I went through the whole cycle of emotions: confused, frustrated, angry. I'll be honest — I even felt a little betrayed. What the hell is going on?

And then the voice in my head got mean.

You've lost your touch. No one wants to hear from you anymore.

I was *this* close to giving up. I thought about packing my bags and calling it a day. Maybe go try X?

I thought it was just me falling off. And I was scared to admit it.

Then I had a call with a 4x CMO. Smart guy, the "been there, done that" sort. And he said the exact same sentence to me. "I don't know if it's the gray hair, man. I've lost my edge. My content just isn't hitting."

And a few days later, a brilliant operator at a giant company you'd recognize told me the same thing in a different way: "I post and get nothing. 1,500 impressions, where I used to get ten thousand. I don't really know what I'm doing anymore."

My friend runs a successful bootstrapped company and called me in a panic. “Dude wtf is going on? I lost 90% of my pipeline because my reach has tanked this year. Are you seeing this too??”

More stories like this are mentioned on Reddit threads, shouted on LinkedIn posts, and whispered at events.

Everyone feels it. But no one knows why.

But I didn't suddenly get worse at writing or marketing. And neither did you.

If it feels like you woke up one day in a new world of LinkedIn... that's because you did.

And once I stopped blaming myself, I had a realization that flipped the whole thing on its head: this isn’t a punishment. It’s an opportunity.

I wasn't washed up. I was just playing the game by the old rules — desperately clinging to a world that doesn't exist anymore.

And if there's an old set of rules I'd been winning with, that means there's a new set of rules.

And I can learn those new rules and get back to winning.

So I raised the white flag. I gave up my old playbook and decided to blow up my LinkedIn strategy and rebuild it from scratch.

But I didn't have the intel I needed. So I spent hours researching, and along the way, I discovered The New Rules of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn rolled out a new algorithm starting in 2025.

Something DID change. It’s not just us going crazy. Yay!!

Those two "wait, what happened to my reach?" waves everyone felt? That was this getting rolled out and refined in real time, on top of us, with no announcement.

And here's why we were all so confused: LinkedIn didn't confirm any of it until March 2026. Your feed and reach were getting quietly reshaped for over a year before anyone said a word.

Then they finally showed their hand. On March 12, 2026, a LinkedIn engineer published the most detailed account the company has ever given of how the feed actually works — a full rebuild from a network-based system to a relevance-based one.

It all comes down to this:

"Our new system ... create[s] a more engaging, personalized, and timely Feed experience that surfaces genuinely valuable content, whether it comes from your immediate network or professionals you've never connected with before."

In other words…

In plain English: the algo stopped asking "who follows Devin?" and started asking "who cares about this topic?"

If you remember one thing today, that’s it.

The old way: I post, it goes to my followers and connections first. They engage, it gets put in front of their connections, and up it climbs. The more followers you had, the bigger your launch pad. Follower count was the moat.

The new way: I post, and before it goes anywhere, the machine reads what it's about. Then it shows it to people interested in that topic — whether they follow me or not.

For your feed…

You're not seeing content because of who you know; you're seeing it based on what you care about.

For your reach…

When your 10,000 views became 3,000, that wasn't a punishment. That was the graph saying: of those 10,000 I used to show this to, I think only 3,000 actually care about this topic.

It used to be reach first, then resonance. Now it's resonance first, then reach.

I have roughly 100,000 followers. But that doesn't help me like it used to. A chunk of those people followed me for sales takes, or leadership stuff, or they're just randos. The graph knows. Big follower count doesn’t springboard posts like it used to.

Which means the “large follower count moat” doesn’t help me like it used to.

Scary? Yea, a little. But remember what I said up top — this isn't a punishment. It's an opportunity.

Because once you understand the new game, you can play it with purpose. While everyone else is still refreshing their analytics and blaming themselves or complaining, you get to go learn the new rules.

So here they are — the ones I’m rebuilding my entire strategy around.

8,000 followers and 80,000 now have roughly the same chance of being seen on any given post. It's about the topic, not the size of your list. If you've been waiting to "build your audience first" before you really go for it, that excuse just died. Which is great news if you're starting (or restarting) today.

Before it distributes a single post, the machine reads your headline, your About, and your work history to decide what you're about. If your profile is like my garage — dusty and all out of order… you misfired before you typed a word.

Updating your profile is the easiest fix you can make today. Do it before you start pumping out more content. Use the words people actually search — keywords, not your clever coined terms. Nobody's searching for your hashtag or coined phrase.

Pillars aren't branding fluff or “dead.” Topic clusters are literally how your content gets sorted and distributed. This consistency is you teaching the machine what to file you under. Get super focused on those topics for three months. Then you earn the right to dabble.

Saves, comments, and dwell time are the currency now. Likes are weighted less than ever before. LinkedIn is cracking down on AI slop and rewarding what they call “knowledge density” — real, useful, keep-this-forever stuff.

Likes are applause. Saves are trust. Applause is good for dopamine rushes, but saves compound into authority. Formats that buy dwell time: carousels, dense infographics, video — and don't sleep on plain text. Highest floor, lowest effort. Just you and your thumbs /keyboard.

Now comments are training data too. The new graph watches who you engage with and who engages back. So skip "great post." Leave 5-10 real comments per day on the right people's stuff, and on your own posts. Reply with an open-loop question that pulls them into the conversation (and lurkers into commenters).

A LinkedIn leader told me: if you've got 20 minutes, spend 10 thinking, 5 commenting, 5 writing. Engagement isn't the afterthought anymore. It's half the job.

Long or short doesn't matter. Did you make someone stop and think? Did you make them reply? A hot take on return-to-office gets you likes, and tells the graph nothing about who you are. Say something classifiable that earns a real reaction from the right person.

Getting classified takes two to three months. Trust takes another beat after that to turn into anything real. And here's the opening: with the dopamine gone, a lot of people are about to quietly quit posting. No viral hit, no reason to keep showing up.

So consistency isn't a virtue right now — it's the entire mechanism. The people who keep going while everyone else rage-quits are the ones who win the new graph.

I don't have this all figured out. I've got the research, the rules, and I've got a hypothesis. What I don't have yet is proof.

So I'm going to get it — in public.

I'm blowing up my entire LinkedIn strategy and rebuilding it from scratch on these new rules.

Yes, I have almost 100,000 followers. And yes, I'm tearing it down anyway. That’s how big this shift is. Ignoring it is punching a one-way ticket to heartache, and very possibly, irrelevance.

So I’m running and sharing my 90-day experiment, documented week by week — every dud, every banger, and the real numbers behind both.

If you want to watch it happen — the profile teardown, the pillar bets, the posts that flop, the ones that pop, and the honest reach data before and after — I'm writing all of it up here, before it's polished into anything else.

I hope you’ll join me on this adventure.

Remember… You didn't get worse. The game just changed.

Let's go learn win it together.

-Devin

PS: It took me over 20 hours to research, write, and edit this newsletter.

Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

Follow me on LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

I sat down with Ty Heath (LinkedIn’s Global Director of Thought Leadership Go-To-Market) at LinkedIn’s HQ to get tactical on executive LinkedIn.

Ty shares her framework for execs who "don't have time to post,” how to use AI and voice tools to sharpen your posts without losing your voice, and what you should do instead of only entertaining with your LinkedIn content.

Plus, Ty shares the surprising reason why 40% of B2B don’t close — plus the three signals to look for if you want to get deals “unstuck.”

Watch and subscribe on YouTube