I am slowly becoming shadow banned by the algorithms of search
We are watching the quiet collapse of the open information highway, and I am not sure anyone is paying attention.
For years, I wrote openly. I shared some of my most personal experiences—the kind of raw, unfiltered life content that you can’t find in a textbook. I answered questions and published insights freely because I believed in the old bargain: create useful content, and the right readers will find it.
But in recent years, I made a decision. I decided on my vocation as a writer. Not a hobbyist, not someone who posts “whenever inspiration strikes,” but a writer. And with that decision came a hard truth: while I genuinely appreciate that free content can help people, in-depth content should be rewarded. This isn’t about gatekeeping wisdom. It’s about sustainability.
Let me be especially clear about something that often gets misunderstood. Just because content is spiritual does not mean it should be free. I know some people believe that spiritual writing—especially deeply personal work—must be offered without cost. I disagree. Fair exchange of energy applies in every domain. A meditation teacher still pays rent. A healer still buys groceries. And a writer who pours their most vulnerable experiences onto the page still has hosting bills to pay.
And those bills are real. Hosting content independent of free platforms gets costly over time. I am not asking for sympathy; I am stating a fact. Every word you read here lives on infrastructure I pay for, not on a social media platform giving away storage in exchange for my data. Independence and freedom from censorship has a price.
That price has become harder to justify when the open web is no longer working the way it used to.
Let me pause here and say something important: I do not hate AI. I actually use it. I use AI for studying Human Design, for editing my drafts, for helping me think through structure and phrasing. It is a tool, and like any tool, it has its place. But just because I use AI does not mean I want to give away my content for free. There is a difference between using a tool and being consumed by a training set. I am happy to work alongside AI. I am not happy to have my most personal writing scraped without consent, credit, or compensation.
And the search engines? They are not even sending me readers anymore. Not in any meaningful way. The algorithms have really changed now that commercial interests are at the forefront of every big platform. User-generated noise from massive platforms gets prioritized over original source expertise. Engagement bait outranks depth. And somewhere in the back of the algorithm, my quiet corner of the web gets buried.
So here is where I have landed. I have been experimenting with this paywall-and-subscriber model for nearly a year now. To be honest, I have seen no meaningful difference in reach, engagement, or discovery. Free or paywalled, the numbers look the same. But I am now forced to reconsider what comes next, because two things have become impossible to ignore:
- I cannot keep sharing such personal experiences without a barrier. For my own emotional and energetic boundaries, I need a firewall between my rawest self and the scraping bots.
- I cannot afford to keep paying for a website that doesn’t generate some form of income. This isn’t a hobby. This is my vocation.
Let me restate what I offer: I still give a tremendous amount through the free subscription. The paywalls are only for the most unfiltered content. The free tier is generous. The paid tier is simply deeper. And maybe that “all free” model works for people who don’t go that deep in what they share. But I share quite deeply. I show up in ways that ask a lot of me. And in return, I need to feel that my energy is honored—and that my vocation as a writer is viable.
AI scrapers systematically harvest every word I publish, including my deepest personal reflections, using my lived experience to train systems that will eventually reproduce my voice without credit, compensation, or even a click back to my site. I am not comfortable with the idea of AI redistributing my most vulnerable stories. And because search engines are no longer sending me readers anyway, the trade-off has become absurd. I lose my privacy, AI gains my voice, and I get nothing in return—not even eyes on the page.
So I am considering more drastic measures. An email gate (via free subscription)separates real humans from crawlers. It is a small barrier, but it works. And beyond that, I might consider stopping public writing altogether, saving my best insights for books where I actually get paid for the work I do.
But here is the question that haunts me. What happens if everyone does this? What happens if every expert, every specialist, every person with genuine source knowledge decides that the open web is no longer worth feeding?
The obvious answer is that the public internet becomes a desert. The only content left will be user-generated forum threads, confidently wrong Reddit comments, AI-generated listicles, and the kind of surface-level slop that drives engagement but teaches nothing.
The rich, textured, hard-won insights of people who have spent years mastering their subjects—let alone the raw vulnerability of personal storytelling—will disappear behind walls or vanish entirely. The information highway becomes a toll road, and then a dead end.
The AI companies that are currently consuming the open web like a buffet will face a slow starvation. Their models are trained on human-generated content, and if humans stop generating high-quality public content, the training data degrades. Model collapse is real. When AI eats its own output, the quality spirals downward. The machines will eventually be training on their own waste, and the result will be a flattening of knowledge into the average, the common, the least objectionable. The rare, the strange, the genuinely original—these things will be lost. Not destroyed, but buried so deep that no algorithm will ever surface them.
And yet, I do not see another path forward for myself. I cannot keep feeding the machine for free. I cannot watch my work get scraped, outranked by nonsense, and ignored by the very people who might benefit from it. I did not start writing to get rich, but I also did not start writing to train my replacement. So the paywall feels less like a business decision and more like a necessary firewall. It is not greed. It is self-preservation. It is honoring my own vocation.
But I worry about the collective consequence. If every independent creator makes the same choice, the open web dies. Not dramatically, not with a final shutdown, but quietly, one expired domain at a time.
The information that survives will be whatever is hosted on platforms too big to fail, whatever is printed in books, and whatever individuals manage to archive before the lights go out. That is not nothing, but it is not enough.
The promise of the internet was that anyone could publish and anyone could find it. That promise is fading, and I am not sure what will replace it. I am only sure that I cannot keep giving my work away to machines that will never thank me, while real humans scroll past without ever knowing I existed.
Internet behavior is different from what it used to be. I have no idea if any of the views are even human anymore. No one leaves comments.
So the wall goes up. And I will sit with the discomfort of knowing that my small act of self-protection is also a small act of withdrawal from the commons. But the commons is already broken. I am just the last one to admit it.
A small plea before you go:
I’ve added a Guestbook to my site—a throwback to the old days of the internet. If you are a human reading this, I would genuinely love for you to sign it. Show me that the internet isn’t totally a ghost town. Let me know you were here.
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