Why Build-in-Public Became a Spam Problem

Build-in-public started as a genuinely good idea.

Be transparent. Share your journey. Let people watch you build something from nothing. The openness creates accountability, builds audience, attracts early users who care about the product before it launches.

For a lot of builders, it worked exactly like that.

Then it became a content strategy.

What Happened to Build-in-Public

When enough people saw that building in public could attract an audience, the practice shifted.

Instead of genuine transparency, it became a formula.

Day 1: announce the idea. Week 2: post an update. Week 6: excited to share the launch. Week 10: lessons from our first 100 users. Week 20: we are shutting down, here is what I learned.

Every step packaged as content. Every milestone framed as a story. Every product update posted as if an audience was waiting.

The problem: most of the time, nobody was.

The Spam Problem

Platforms that reward product posting attract product posting.

Twitter filled up with "building X in public, follow along" threads. LinkedIn feeds drowned in announcements. Product Hunt posts disappear within hours because everyone is launching and nobody is genuinely discovering.

The build-in-public movement, at scale, created a specific kind of noise.

Everyone broadcasting. Not enough people actually listening.

The issue is structural. When a platform makes it easy to post about your product, people post about their products. When there is no filter between genuine contribution and self-promotion, the promotional content takes over.

The signal-to-noise ratio collapses.

This is how platforms die slowly. Not from lack of users, but from lack of reason to pay attention.

The Algorithm Is a Values Statement

Here is something that does not get said enough about social platforms.

The algorithm is not a neutral tool. It is a values statement.

Whatever the algorithm rewards, the community produces more of. Reward engagement bait, you get engagement bait. Reward product spam, you get product spam. Reward genuine insight, you get genuine insight.

This is the lever that determines what kind of community a platform becomes.

Most platforms get it wrong because they optimise for engagement above everything else. Engagement is not the same as value. A spammy product post can generate engagement. A genuine technical insight can go unread. If the algorithm cannot tell the difference, the platform degrades regardless of how good the intentions were at the start.

What Forg Changed and Why

Forg's early positioning was drifting toward build-in-public.

The problem became clear fast. If the platform rewarded product posting, Forg would become a place where builders spam their products at each other with nobody actually paying attention. A promotional feed with a professional skin on top.

That is not a professional network. That is a bulletin board.

So the feed algorithm changed.

Genuine content gets priority. Tech insights, honest learnings, opinions about building, things that are actually useful or interesting to other builders. This is what rises in the feed.

Product updates and launch posts have their place, but they reach people only after a builder has established real presence through genuine contribution. You build an audience by being worth following. Then your product posts land somewhere real.

The principle: earn reach by contributing value, not by promoting yourself.

Why This Is the Right Call

Professional networks are built on trust and signal.

LinkedIn's core problem is that it became a promotional platform. Everyone is announcing, celebrating, sharing milestones. The genuine signal is buried under noise. Nobody opens LinkedIn expecting to learn something.

The platforms that stay useful are the ones where signal-to-noise stays high. Where you can open the feed and reliably find something worth reading.

That requires an algorithm that actively protects signal. It requires making a deliberate choice that not all content gets equal reach, and what determines reach is whether the content contributes something genuine to the people reading it.

This is how professional reputation works in the real world.

The people in any field who actually get listened to are not the ones who shout loudest about their own work. They are the ones who consistently contribute insight others find useful. Their signal-to-noise ratio is high enough that when they do talk about their work, people pay attention.

A well-designed feed algorithm replicates that dynamic at scale.

What This Means for Builders

Practically, the shift means one thing.

Post like a professional, not like a marketer.

Share what you actually learned this week. Write about the technical decision you made and why it was harder than it looked. Post about the thing you built that did not work and what you figured out from it. Talk about the tools you use, the patterns you keep seeing, the things the industry is getting wrong.

Build the kind of presence that makes people want to follow you because you are genuinely worth following.

Then, when you launch something or hit a milestone, post about it. At that point it lands somewhere real because you have an audience that actually cares about what you do.

The shortcut of posting product updates into the void never worked. It just took a while for platforms to stop rewarding it.

The Bigger Picture

There is a version of professional networking for builders that is actually useful.

Not a broadcast channel. Not a launch board. Not a feed of people announcing things to nobody.

A network where genuine contribution earns real reach, where builders post things worth reading, and where the platform actively maintains the quality of what it surfaces.

That is what Forg is trying to build.

The feed algorithm is not a technical detail. It is the most important product decision a social platform makes.

Get it wrong and you build a spam board.

Get it right and you build a network people actually want to be part of.