Picture the feed. A tool wrote the post. A tool wrote the admiring first comment. A tool summarised the post for people who did not read it, and drafted their replies.
Somewhere in that chain a person was theoretically the audience. You would be forgiven for not finding one.
We build these systems for a living, so this is not a complaint about technology. It is a complaint about what happens when everybody automates the same half of a conversation and nobody automates the listening.
How the loop closed
Quietly, and for reasons that made sense one at a time.
Posting consistently is hard, so a tool drafts. Engagement is rewarded, so a tool comments. Volume is rewarded, so the volume rises. Everybody is following the incentive directly in front of them, and the aggregate is a room where every voice is generated and no ear is present.
In this industry it has a particular flavour. Congratulations posts on transactions. Market updates that are the same market update. A photograph of keys. Something that opens with "I'll never forget the look on their faces."
The tells
You already know them. You have just been too polite to say so.
A one-line opener sitting on its own. A line break. A slightly grander restatement of the same line. Three short sentences of rising drama. A question at the end that nobody could possibly want to answer. And that faint, frictionless competence where nothing is wrong and nothing is anybody's.
The people still reading can hear it. They will not tell you, because there is no polite way to tell somebody their post sounded generated. They will simply stop looking.
Why nobody turns it off
Because the numbers look fine. Impressions hold up. Likes hold up. The tools that generate the content report on the content, and the report is encouraging.
Meanwhile the thing that actually mattered, which is whether anybody in your market now thinks of you first, is not on that dashboard and never was.
What is somehow still real
Quite a lot, and all of it is the unscalable part.
Specific numbers about your own patch that nobody else has. What actually happened at a showing. Being wrong out loud about a prediction you made in March. A photograph of a street that people who live there will recognise. The thing you noticed that is too small and too particular for a machine to have invented.
I am not romantic about it. I have simply never seen a generated post produce a phone call, and I have seen a specific one do it repeatedly.
What I would do instead
Use the machine for the parts that genuinely are chores. Reformatting. Cutting three hundred words down to a hundred. Twenty subject lines you will discard nineteen of. Turning your own rambling voice note into something with paragraphs in it.
Then write the observation yourself. It does not have to be good. It has to be yours, and specific, and about this week.
And read more than you post. That sounds like a moral position. It is not. It is the only way you find out what people in your market are actually worried about, and that is the raw material for everything else.
Any road up
If a machine wrote it and a machine read it, no business happened. Something was measured and something was reported, but nothing happened.
Post half as often and mean it. That is the whole strategy, and it costs nothing.