Why View Counts Are Vanity: Leaving Social Media for a Personal Sandbox

I recently posted to both LinkedIn and Facebook to explain why I’m stepping off the algorithmic hamster wheel and no longer posting to social media feeds. Instead, I’m focusing on my personal sandbox.

I haven’t been active on social media since I stepped away to begin my “future life” back in October 2025. To be completely honest, I haven’t missed social media as a whole in the slightest.

AI and Social Media

Whenever I have dipped my toes back in, social media (and LinkedIn in particular) has felt more like a performance than a genuine professional space. I believe that a huge portion of the posts floating around are AI-generated, and there’s a relentless push to “out-vulnerable” each other to trigger the algorithm’s version of “engagement”.

For instance, when I checked my LinkedIn feed, I was seeing posts from people that I know (and like) who were suddenly channeling the very spirit of William Shakespeare, sharing incredibly poignant and emotional posts. The trouble is, I know the people behind the posts, and this wasn’t them! They’d simply asked Artificial Intelligence to craft them a social media post that would generate likes and engagement.

And if I read any more of that breathless “broetry” where people (and by people, I mean AI…) write single-line formatted posts trying to out-vulnerable one another for “engagement”, I may scream!

Worse, many of the comments on these posts were similarly crafted by AI. This leads to the bizarre situation where humans are asking robots to both post and comment on posts.

So, what’s the point?

Engagement Is A Vanity Metric

The system isn’t engineered to reward the right things. A quick, funny photo gets tens of thousands of views. But a deeply researched strategic piece that could actually help someone solve a real operational problem struggles for a fraction of that reach. When engagement becomes a vanity metric, you can spend an immense amount of time on LinkedIn (or any other social media platform) without ever building true professional authority.

For me, the feed has become a digital distraction that pulls us away from building the deep, real-world business relationships that actually matter.

Or, as Mark Schaefer brilliantly puts it in his book Marketing Rebellion: ‘The most human company wins.’

A World Without Social Media

I’m certainly not alone. Back in 2016, Cal Newport made the very compelling case to “Quit Social Media“.

And a growing number of people I highly respect are making the exact same choice. They are quietly logging out of the feed to refocus their energy on what really counts: helping people and growing businesses, rather than just posting about it.

I appreciate that social media feels like a necessary evil for many businesses. I felt that way too when I ran Tubblog – The Hub for MSPs. So, stepping away from the feed isn’t a choice everyone will make, and that’s OK.

But even when I was active on social media for business, I always tried to use the social platforms to bring people back to my home property, and my personal sandbox — my website.

Choosing a Personal Sandbox

I’ve been blogging for over 20 years. If those two decades have taught me anything, it’s that you don’t build your house on sand. Relying on an unpredictable, ever-changing algorithm to distribute my work simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

So, I’m opting out of the noise. I’m going back to basics and restarting my personal blog here at RichardTubb.co.uk. No gaming the system, no formatting tricks to artificially inflate “dwell time”, and absolutely no writing for a robot. Instead, I’m using my own website as a sandbox to share unfiltered lessons from my advisory work, document my journey into my post-business “future life”, and shine a light on products and people that I genuinely respect.

If view counts are vanity, I believe that writing things that are genuinely useful to a small, dedicated circle of peers is sanity.

Conclusion

To be clear: I’m not disappearing from LinkedIn, Facebook and social media completely. I’ll still be spending my 5-minutes a day consuming silly videos of Guinea Pigs and Pro Wrestling over on Instagram.

And I still value real connections. I’ll always check out the profiles of people who connect with me, and I’ll absolutely still read and reply to my direct messages.

But you won’t see me in the feed.

I’ll continue to send new articles and blog posts directly via email to a small circle of business owners, friends, and leaders on this blog. If you want to bypass the algorithm entirely and get these deep dives straight to your inbox, I’d love for you to join us at richardtubb.co.uk/blog/