I’ve been growing my Twitter account since 2010, and over time I got to something like 30000 followers in ~2018.
Then, I founded a crypto company, and as is par for the course, it was necessary to buy followers to appear more legit. I bought something like 100k for $2000, and they were added over the course of a few weeks.
In web3, you don’t get legitimacy through product or PMF, or god-forbid innovation, you get it through being loud and popular on X, so called “crypto twitter”.
If you run analytics on any web3 founder’s account, or the account of their “company”, you will notice that easily more than 50% of their followers are bots - it’s just the way it is.
Buying followers was a terrible mistake. While these companies generally don’t care about nuking their reach as long as it makes them appear popular, this can really destroy personal accounts.
Here’s how it works: the algo looks at your relative engagement and applies a bonus if the engagement comes from verified accounts. By having a lot of unverified bots as followers who do not engage with your posts, algo thinks you’re uninteresting and stops showing you to others. This was even confirmed by grok.
With a declining reach, you’re shown to fewer and fewer people, and you end up in shadowban jail. What’s worse - there’s an extreme penalty if you’re spotted removing followers en-masse.
So now that you have an account full of bots and a decreased reach, you’re stuck: you can’t remove them quickly to get engagement up, and you can’t get them to engage to reach beyond their numbers so you can outgrow them.
The new release of the X algo in Q3 of 2025 gave us a glimmer of hope though, and allowed us to dream about breaching that 3M impressions threshold needed to activate X payouts.
I’ve been posting bite-sized tips on my X account while attempting to de-shadowban it, but got a few requests for longer form content that goes more in depth or shows how to use analytics tools.
And so, this newsletter was born: aiming to extract actionable tips and tricks from the algo’s code, and to save people’s accounts from Shadowban jail.
This is Shadowbreak. Welcome to the light!