The internet didn't invent people supporting each other. It industrialised it.

For as long as people have shared things publicly, the people around them have helped those things travel. Friends recommend a friend's business. Colleagues congratulate each other on promotions. Founders turn up when another founder launches something. Creators share the work of people they respect. None of this needed a name because it was simply what people did.

Engagement pods took that instinct and turned it into a system.

The original proposition was understandable. Posting into an empty room is difficult, particularly when you're starting out. You might spend an hour writing something useful only to watch it disappear into a feed with almost no response. Do that often enough and eventually you begin wondering why you're bothering.

A small group of people agreeing to support each other seemed like an obvious answer. You knew somebody would read what you published. You weren't doing it alone. For people trying to develop the confidence and discipline to share their ideas publicly, that could be genuinely useful.

Then the objective started to change.

As social platforms became more important to careers and businesses, engagement itself became something worth optimising. The question was no longer simply whether people you knew would see your work. It became how quickly you could generate likes and comments after publishing, how many people you could coordinate, and whether that activity could persuade an algorithm to distribute the post further.

Small groups became large groups. Message threads became engagement queues. Dedicated tools appeared. Some services automated likes and comments, while others added AI-generated responses or coordinated large numbers of accounts around the same content.

The human behaviour underneath it hadn't disappeared, but it was increasingly buried beneath machinery designed to manufacture reach.

For an ordinary founder, consultant or creator looking at all of this from the outside, the result can be discouraging. You're no longer comparing your post with somebody else's post. You're potentially comparing your ability to attract attention with a creator supported by a sophisticated distribution system, a large network of coordinated accounts, paid engagement, automation or some combination of them.

It can make social media feel like a game you were late to and don't know the rules for.

Supporting people became a strategy for influencing algorithms.

There is an important difference between wanting people to see something you've created and building machinery specifically to make a platform believe that content is organically generating more interest than it really is.

That second behaviour is where platforms are increasingly drawing the line.

LinkedIn now explicitly describes an engagement pod as a coordinated group that likes, comments and shares posts in an attempt to increase visibility and virality. In March 2026, the company said it was taking significant steps against this behaviour, including removing LinkedIn groups showing signs of engagement-pod activity and warning members whose behaviour indicated participation. LinkedIn also says suspected inauthentic engagement can affect distribution and potentially lead to account restrictions.

Automation has made the divide even clearer. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits unauthorised bots and automated methods that create, comment on, like, share or re-share posts or otherwise drive inauthentic engagement. The company has separately said that it is reducing automated comments and third-party tools that create fake conversations.

This is happening while AI makes artificial participation easier than ever. A person no longer needs to read a post to produce a plausible comment underneath it. Software can generate the response and, in some cases, another tool can publish it. Fake accounts and automated activity can make an audience appear larger or more enthusiastic than the group of humans actually paying attention.

LinkedIn has started addressing that problem directly too. In June 2026, it said it was working to reduce generic AI-generated content and comments created at scale with little or no human involvement, while placing greater emphasis on content containing genuine perspective, context and expertise.

At its worst, the engagement-pod model has therefore become part of a much larger attention economy: automated comments, fake engagement, enormous reciprocal networks and tools designed to make activity appear more organic than it really is.

The strange thing is that the original problem never went away.

People still need people.

Most founders aren't professional creators. Neither are most consultants, coaches, executives, advisers or small-business owners. They have companies to run, customers to look after and actual work to do. Publishing consistently is already difficult before you add the expectation that they should spend hours every day networking underneath hundreds of other posts.

They also don't necessarily have a large audience waiting when they begin. Their first posts may be good and still receive very little attention. They may watch established creators generate hundreds of comments while their own ideas barely reach the people they know.

The obvious response is often to publish less. Eventually, many stop altogether.

This is the part of the engagement-pod story worth preserving. Not the attempt to manipulate distribution, but the recognition that creating in public becomes easier when you know there are people around you.

A handful of peers who notice when you haven't posted can create accountability. Knowing that somebody will actually read what you've written makes publishing feel less like shouting into an empty room. Seeing people you know working through the same challenge can make it easier to keep going yourself.

None of that requires five hundred people.

It doesn't require a bot.

And it doesn't require pretending that an algorithm owes you reach because a certain number of comments arrived within the first thirty minutes.

It requires people.

Maybe the answer isn't more engagement. It's better circles.

There is another version of this behaviour that has existed alongside engagement pods the entire time.

Five founders regularly read each other's posts because they're interested in what the others are building. A group of consultants who met through a programme continue supporting each other's work afterwards. Several creators become friends and naturally keep up with what the others publish. Former colleagues stay connected and congratulate one another when something important happens.

From the outside, some of that activity can look coordinated because sometimes it is. People send links to friends. They remind each other about launches. They make plans to catch up. They create group chats. Human relationships have always involved coordination.

What changes the character of it is what the coordination is trying to achieve.

If the objective is to generate a calculated burst of activity designed to manipulate distribution, the people become part of an engagement system. Bigger groups become attractive because more participants mean more potential signals. Speed becomes important. Tracking becomes important. Eventually automation becomes attractive because the system is asking humans to perform more actions than they realistically have time for.

If the objective is helping a small group of people continue showing up for one another, the incentives move in the opposite direction. Smaller groups become useful because members actually know who they're supporting. Relevance matters because nobody wants to spend their time responding to things they don't care about. Automation becomes unnecessary because the human response is the thing you were trying to preserve in the first place.

That is the direction we think is more interesting.

Coterie doesn't connect to your social account and start engaging on your behalf. It doesn't generate comments for you or promise a certain number of likes. Members go to the original post, video, article or launch and participate themselves.

The schedule exists for a much more ordinary reason: people are busy.

Without some structure, good intentions disappear into the week. A founder means to support another founder's launch but forgets. Someone sends a post into a WhatsApp group and it disappears underneath forty other messages. A group that once supported each other gradually becomes quiet because nobody has a reason to be there at the same time.

A Coterie gives that support a place in the calendar.

The ambition isn't to create the largest possible network of people who will engage with you. It's to create smaller circles where the people are relevant enough to care about what one another is doing and accountable enough to keep showing up.

That may mean six founders rather than six hundred accounts. It might be clients from the same programme, professionals from the same industry, creators working toward similar goals or people who simply decided they want to remain part of each other's professional lives.

Their participation still matters. Reciprocity is part of the circle. If you want people to make time for your work, you should be prepared to make time for theirs. But what you actually say remains yours. The point isn't to manufacture a particular reaction; it's to make sure the people don't disappear from the process.

There is a broader reason we think this matters in 2026.

The internet is rapidly making artificial attention cheaper.

Content can be generated in seconds. Comments can be generated in seconds. Accounts can be automated. Engagement can be purchased. An entire conversation can increasingly look busy without very many people having paid meaningful attention to what was actually said.

Real attention is moving in the opposite direction. It remains finite.

You cannot automate somebody genuinely caring about your work. You cannot generate the history between two founders who have watched each other build companies for three years. You cannot fake the feeling of seeing a familiar name underneath something you were nervous to publish and knowing that person actually read it.

As artificial activity becomes easier to create, those smaller signals of genuine human attention may become more valuable, not less.

That's the future we're interested in.

Not a cleverer engagement pod. Not another system for tricking an algorithm. And not another promise that thirty comments in thirty minutes will make you go viral.

Just better infrastructure for something people were already doing before any of those things existed.

Showing up for their people.