A Letter to Substack on the Occasion of my Fiftieth Post

With some suggestions

To The Leadership at Substack:

Let me begin by saying how grateful I am for your site and how fulfilling it has been for me to write here. I understand that in modern terms we have a transactional relationship; I’m given a platform to write and you make money off it in some fashion. But my brain is medieval and I tend to think of relationships as bonds with defined duties. Having been offered much, I try to work hard and bring credit and traffic to the site, and you have more than done your duty in fending off attacks from within and without on the part of vengeful, untalented hacks angry that others more thoughtful than they were getting attention. That some of them benefitted from your support and largesse from the outset is the worst sort of perfidy. But enough about those neopronouned wokescolds for the moment.

In the alternate timeline where SAN got its way, Nazi = someone who refuses to accept strawberry ice cream as a valid gender expression.

I have gone from 0 subscribers when I began as a commenter on

John Carter

’s stack (to which I would encourage you all to subscribe and support with the full measure of Substack’s resources) to nearly 2,000 after my previous forty-nine posts. During that time, I have received a great deal of support from both a few big supporters, like

Glenn’s Substack

, and from thousands of other writers at all levels. My experience in this is not unique; the general consensus as I perceive it is that Substack is a place uniquely conducive to nurturing talent. I have done my best to foster this environment, liking, following, and subscribing not just where I see good work but the potential for it, small sparks that can be blown into a great flame with the right encouragement.

What disagreements I’ve had have been small scale and quick to pass for the most part. Writers are a tempermental bunch and when one invests one’s ideas with a part of one’s self image criticism can play like attack. I’m not immune to that feeling. I try to take my ego out of the equation as much as possible, to ignore slights and passive aggression directed my way, and interpret things in the most charitable light. The strongest emotions are the most mutable. As such, I rarely have recourse to the block button, but when I do, it’s for a well-considered reason.

Today, for example, a person calling himself Zog Destroyer decided to comment on one of my older posts. His response was only tangentially on topic and mostly consisted of complaints about how right wing people are smeared as Nazis and also that real Nazis are awesome. He passive-aggressively called for “action” against ZOG and Jews and Zionists, claiming that this is what real National Socialists do. It was a textbook list of what the media imagines to be major themes in serious right wing thought, and that textbook was clearly on loan from the library at Quantico.

Call for some vague “action” tbd in the DMs, check; Holocaust denial, check; “I’m as worried about the feds as you are, fellow posters,” check; “what was everyone talking about on 4Chan six months ago- ‘blackwashing', yeah,” check; hate gays and tr00ns but use DEI-approved language on the off chance FBI HR reads this, check; establish that nothing says ‘Nazi’ like vaccine skepticism, check; use the phrase ZOG that was edgy in 1992 when Randy Weaver was fighting it, check; “all props to Ye- see HR I don’t really mean all this it’s just my assignment I promise don’t make me go to diversity training I’ve got golf than morning . . ,” check; let’s see what’s left . . . Jew group, Jew boogyman, all Jews I haven’t specifically hated, specific Jews I haven’t hated enough . . . I think that’s it.

Cred . . . established.

Of course, it may not have been an actual fed. My other working theory was that one of the subjects of the article, which dealt in part with hysterical overreactions to a supposed Nazi menace on Substack, may have returned from ragequitting the site in order to falseflag my comments section. “See- here’s a real Nazi just like we said they were real-” that kind of thing. Others brought up that it may have been a bot, trained in the bowels of Stormfront or /pol or something like that. The way the comment just sort of meanders through overheated edgelord poast tropes would lend credence to that theory. It even calls out the problem of fed infiltration- how meta.

The problem with this sort of commenter as opposed to an actual person with a specific disagreement about your work is exactly that sort of indeterminativeness. You don’t want to waste your time with someone who’s trying to lure you into a Discord space to talk about the affirmative steps you will take in furtherance of your “actions” against George Soros and the enemies of Ye. You also don’t want to be talking to a bot, and least of all do you want to engage with anyone from Substack Against Nazis, whom even the bots find tiresome. Now Substack does offer a ready solution to this- the block button. And you can also report these commenters to Substack headquarters for evaluation, both of which I did. But when I did so the options were sort of limited.

Impersonation is the best approximation of the problem I could think of, since everything about this account is fake something, but the nature of the falsehood is, I think, important. Much like how X (Twitter) has the community notes feature, it could be helpful for Substack to label such accounts at the very least as fed or bots (alts would present a different and perhaps insolvable challenge). Perhaps this could take the form of a glowing checkmark next to their names, much like the orange, purple, and white marks in current use. This would not restrict their speech, merely mark them as bad actors, to be treated by the other members according to their own inclinations. The latter would simply have more information with which to make decisions. While to more experienced Substackers such accounts are obvious, newer users may waste valuable time on interactions that lead nowhere with trolls just here to cause problems, worsening the experience for them.

To quote Oppenheimer, they will glow with the radiance of a thousand suns…

The criteria by which these accounts would earn glowie status would have to be determined by computer specialists more adept with precise and technical methods than my own intuitive sense. I know that X can search out bots, and in fact a good portion of users were just that for many subscribers to top accounts. Eliminating bots gives everyone, patrons and those behind the site, a clearer idea of who is actually engaging and who is just working the algorithms. This will also have the happy knock-on effect of clearing some space in the dense thicket of mysterious subscriber numbers.

Which brings up my final issue. Many accounts on Substack, mainly from prominent individuals, have enormous subscriber numbers but little in the way of engagement that is consistent with that. My concerns about this are twofold. One, do subscriber numbers affect reach in the algorithms used by Substack in suggesting work or denoting top writers? If so, then gaming this system in any way, with fake subscribers, importing lists, or making use of bots, could affect popularity and exposure. Also, on the level of morale, I also think some distinction should be made between subscribers imported into Substack and those gained within the system. Many newer writers must wonder, as I did, how so many people can have posted their first piece a month ago and yet they are batting 10,000 already. For my part, I do this for fun, but for someone looking to make a living here it could be discouraging. To be clear, I don’t want to take away from anyone who built an audience elsewhere and migrated to Substack later; some of my favorite stacks fall under that category. But where there is no engagement to support the notion that someone has earned that 10,000, people will necessarily, fairly or not, wonder about what is happening behind the scenes.

There are no good pictures of bot farms, so here’s a farmbot.

In closing, I would again like to mention what Substack has meant to me. I think I speak for many here in saying that writing is a lonely endeavor, and that, especially in the smaller communities in the world one struggles to find people who share one’s artistic vision. Again and again I’ve read stories here (and shout them out in the comments, please) of people finding a thoughtful readership, helpful criticism, useful advice, and above all, companionship. Some people post things that they could never say to those around them, and trust that their words will be received with good faith and appreciation. To you at Substack who have made this possible, for myself and so many others, thank you.

The Librarian of Celaeno