Editor’s Note: Sorry these are coming at you fast and furious. This post was originally scheduled for earlier in the week, but Richard Kerr and Bilt messed up my editorial calendar. At least it’s been good to brush up on multiplication tables?

The churning and MS community has some level of natural cyclicity and, well, churn to it. For example, the start and end of the year is always more buzzy as the last chance to finish up things tied to annual caps and the first chance to knock them out again hours into the new year. Widespread shutdowns generally coax a lot of people out of hibernation, too. 

Even on a personal level, you might get slammed at work or have something going on with family and friends that necessitates a step back, at least temporarily. 

All of this to say that we all have a lot going on both including and excluding MS, and it’s only natural to see plenty of names wax and wane depending on what’s going on (outside of victims of email jobs like myself who are chronically around).

However, this truth hasn’t stopped me from hearing a lot of chatter lately across the churnosphere that essentially boils down to “I haven’t heard from X in awhile – they used to be such a big contributor, where did they go?”. 

There’s plenty of reasons someone might not be around, and in some cases, it’s just because they’re busy. But in 2026, it might also be that they’ve decided to take a break from sharing sensitive things in groups that are private, but don’t feel as private anymore. 

The whales (and dolphins even) have seen so many good things die in the last couple years that sharing something outside of a probe group suddenly feels like it has zero utility compared to a few years ago.

It’s partially a symptom of how easy MS has been lately, of course – sharing a new target now is very different than sharing a particular Kroger in rural Michigan that DGAF how many gift cards you buy, because everybody can start hitting it without it being necessary to take a flight to Frankenmuth (I chose Frankenmuth because of the funny name, but it actually looks quite lovely!) 

I understand why many heavy hitters are choosing now as the time to reconsider their feelings towards sharing, even in private. We’re losing easy levers by the day, and no amount of Slack, Discord or Telegram reactions can bring them back. 

But I also understand why beginners and more intermediate players are bummed out to see those handles gradually disappear from the private groups – that build up of knowledge gleaned from years of grinding is really insightful when you’re trying to scale up. 

So, are whales actually going extinct? While the fintechs and banks are certainly trying a little too hard to pretend they’re the captain of the Pequod, there’s still enough low hanging fruit out there to make the juice worth the squeeze. 

What is a shrimp or reef fish to do? If it were me, I’d work towards scaling to a bigger body of water or finding a group of like-minded fish ready to grow together. The only constant is change, and the game will continue to change in both good and bad ways over the next year. But now that MS can be done fully from the couch, I wouldn’t count on sharing ever returning in quite the same way it used to be.

Prost!