I Heart Substack
Watering seeds, and yanking out roots.
In 2023, Substack launched Notes, an interesting feature that eventually acquired some wonky algorithms tuned exactly how we expect Silicon Valley algorithm wizards to tune “content”—to maximize the immediate attention labor ($) of as many normies as possible. If a note doesn’t gain traction right away, it gets applied a tag that guarantees it goes nowhere because normies don’t want to see it. The note is sent to the Notes morgue within a day, where the words are autopsied for wrongthink, and then sent to decompose and rot for eternity at the digital cemetery. The tyranny of the normie majority strikes again.
No matter how clever or witty or insightful you think your note might be, expect it to end up in the Notes morgue before you sit down for the next bowl of morning Wheaties, the breakfast of failed Notetakers. If you have little reach, and you wish to use Notes to spread your wings and acquire new readers, keep it simple (very simple!) and obvious. Humans write algorithms, making them the digital versions of NPCs and Normies. Eight out of every ten humans on Substack are either NPCs (Heather Cox Richardson readers) or Normies—readers of the other top 99 Substacks.
Around the time Notes was released, its retarded cousins were conceived: Chats and also Direct Messages, or DMs as the kids call them.
I don’t use Chats.
Last week I got an email from Substack’s “bestseller growth team” that read in part:
“We noticed a trending plateau in your growth revenue…”
“We noticed you don’t use Chats. Bestsellers who use Chats have double the rate of growth compared to those who don’t use Chats.”
It was like being admonished by Anna Kendrick in the global recession-era “comedy” Up In The Air.
“Studies show that bestsellers who use Chats will increase Substack’s revenue since we’re blowing through our VC runway at a wasteful clip by setting up in the Sham Fransicko Bay area where we have to pay our tech bros 3-5x the salary of anywhere else.”
I know the kid was just doing his job, but I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the reply button and began typing...
Dear *******,
Thanks for the tip. Chats are gay. Not the alphabet rainbow gay, but the 1990s gay which roughly translates to cringe or lame but Millennials stopped saying it because they were afraid of the speech police in their ranks, which also made them gay.
It would be a complete waste of my writing and research time doing AMAs or participating in any of the other attention labor extraction side shows you provide. Though I do use notes now and again for short posts and shit posts.
I resent Substackers who bomb my inbox with emails that say "Hey everyone! Chats are open, you can ask me anything!" I often unsubscribe when I get them. I can’t do that to my readers. I’m not relevant enough to send them an email that takes time out of their very important lives to gossip about shit in some chat. Their days on this earth are limited, and I won’t try to monetize even an hour of their time for my financial gain with silly gimmicks. Besides, I thought that’s what the comment section was for.
I know why you’re pushing for maximum growth like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross. You want your bestsellers to.. A. B. G. A-Always, B-Be, G-Growing. ALWAYS. BE. GROWING.
You see this watch?
But Growth is for “content creators” to attract people who love to feed at their troughs of vapid and shallow slop for mindless gayntertainment. I resent the attention extraction carnival that has become the great mind control and human wasting program formerly known as the Internet. This isn’t some Don Draper “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco,” rant, either. When I launched it was entirely by accident, and I didn’t write for growth or money. When people came flocking to read my words I started caring too much about growth and made it a primary focus for a while, which was the wrong thing to do.
Growth requires formulaic performances, leaving no room for evolution or change. Things got redundant and boring. I knew it couldn’t last. But once you stop doing the thing that people liked that brought them to you, they get mad at you, which...they will anyway.
The only people I respect on your platform (apart from my based readers) are writers and a few exiled scientists who will never hold institutional jobs ever again, not content creators. And most of those writers aren’t even best sellers. Speaking of…have you read Heather Cox Richardson? I know she makes you guys a boatload of money, but perhaps my growth ambitions are limited by my pesky desire for self-respect.
It's true what you say, my growth has been flat, but I'm proud of it. I'm the only 5-figure Substack who has cycled through 2k readers in one year. Why? Because I endeavor to tell the truth (as best as I can see it) and no matter how much people say they want to read the truth...the truth is, they're lying. The truth shocks and insults them, and makes them feel uncomfortable, and if anything has become forbidden in our present age, it’s feeling uncomfortable. People will resent anyone who desires to tell them the truth, but they won't even know why. But because I desire to tell the truth, I believe I can tell you why—they don’t like feeling uncomfortable.
Over the past year, I’ve lost most MAGA cultists who cannot see they’re being played for damn fools by a rebranded globohomo package which has zero elements of nationalism and is hardly masking its total subjugation by Israel, its service to UN Agenda 2030, the WEF, and the Club of Rome’s technocratic future dystopia, now fronted by Bliderberg whores Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. I’ve purged Electric Vehicle owners, National Fixedball League lovers, Dispensationalists, Zionists, two Israeli citizens, other non-Israeli genocide lovers, Con Inc. media enthusiasts (aka Mossad blackmailed propagandists), American voters who still believe change is possible at the ballot box (it’s pretty much all of them), Churchill worshippers, women who think criticism of feminism is criticism of all women, Tim Pool normies (a special kind of normie), bronze age butt plugs, super brain force male vitality consumers, and parents of child Swifties.
Do you have a special plaque award for 5-figure substackers who cycle out 2k readers in a year? Please let me know and I'll send a mailing address. I’m certain I’m the only one in the short history of your platform who has earned it.
In numeric terms, it was about two thousand readers. In relative terms, it was no loss at all. They were all replaced with (+2400) open-minded skeptics, chud uncles, based mamas, truthers, noticers, historical revisionists, and V8-driving salt of the earth swill-swigging BAMFs.
To summarize....I know you're just doing your job, and I respect that, but to hell with growth. Success for me is measured in truth, honesty, and respect for my reader’s time and minds. Nothing else. I’ve seen your top bestsellers, and it’s no company I wish to keep. If I end up on a downward trend for the next two years and lose my bestseller badge, I will not care because it probably means I still have my integrity and self-respect, which are not for sale.
Thanks for the pep talk.
Best Regards,
Good Citizen
PS— how much runway does Substack have left if you’re sending desperate emails to bestsellers after a mere 2% revenue slide?
It was a cathartic email reply to compose, but I never clicked the send button. So it ended up here. The kid was just doing his job, and he probably lives in San Francisco, so I didn’t want to add any more misery to his life.
When messaging first appeared, I started receiving notices or requests. Strangers were “slipping into my DMs” but not with any shirtless selfies. It was exhausting, so I stopped reading them completely for 14 months unless it was from a paid subscriber. It was a nice, peaceful, and relaxing 14 months. But Silicon Valley companies don’t want humans to have peace and relaxation. Substack wasn’t happy that my attention wasn’t going to these unread DM requests that piled up, so they kept reminding me with annoying emails that my attention was urgently required.
As I sifted through 14 months of unread requests I counted about two or three weekly “unread” DMs telling me I must read a post they had written. It might seem flattering to be called upon to validate the work of others, but most of these were spam. The messages were often elementary, soft, weak, and passive. My curiosity was rarely piqued. Two were somewhat interesting, and I read those and shared them on Notes. And perhaps I missed something brilliant, and it’s my loss, and maybe sometime in the year 2068, on my deathbed, I’ll ponder this regret.
If you’re going to self-promote, or try to slip into someone’s DMs, start with a connection—humor, irreverence, sarcasm, hope (people love that), or even flattery without seeming desperate. At the very least put some thought into it, and be different. Be exciting. Be interesting. Don’t be a spammer.
Tickle their undercarriage with something like: I enjoyed your post on diversity initiatives for trade union bosses in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. I’ve been talking about this for years with my husband who’s a two-spirit bisexual plumber, and he agrees! You articulated the issue in such a unique way. My husband printed your article and is taking it to his white cis trade union boss. I’ve been writing about this issue on substack for a few months and expressed my ideas here <insert a link to your BEST substack post>. If you have a minute let me know what you think. I’d love to get your feedback.
If you’re not a free or paid subscriber to the writer you solicit, you’ve lied, and they can see that you’re a liar because next to your handle it will say one or the other. This is why I went 14 months without reading requests. I had four in a row who lied and said they were “fans” but were not even free subscribers. They were simply mass-spamming “bestseller” DMs. I’m sure there’s some toggle switch setting somewhere in Substack’s vast and ridiculous dashboard settings to block these people but I don’t know where it is and I’m sure if Graham Hancock went looking for it, even he wouldn’t find it.
As for the rest of them, I’m not sure why they’d want the opinion of a writer who started out as a performer caring too much about growth, and who just spent a good year purging his Substack of readers through truth or insults, though the former is often misinterpreted as the latter.
I'm no arbiter of what's 'good’ and what isn't. I don’t believe many people are, no matter how few or many works they’ve sold, or how many readers or subscribers they have. After all, I’m here as a very weak “bestseller” and entirely by accident. In 2021, a friend’s girlfriend set me up on a blind double date with a sweet younger woman of another generation, who, if it wasn’t for a disturbing set of peculiarities might have made us a good match. I spent the evening like Larry David in a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, trying not to be repulsed by her assortment of poor bodily aesthetic choices.
The next morning I began spilling a torrent of articulations about my repulsion, in an essay on the Banalty of Tattoos. Within a few weeks, I had hundreds of subscribers. I never planned to get them. I didn’t think many people would see the damn post. Then I knew I had to create a “brand” and jump through all the creative hoops in a “dashboard” tab provided by Substack. It was all very exciting and unplanned. And yes, to be clear, this Substack was birthed accidentally by insulting people with tattoos. That’s over half of Millennials and Zoomers, a quarter of Gen X, and all Boomer biker gangs, sailors, ex-cons, and dykes.
Yet because of that orange check mark next to my name, and despite my penchant for unintentionally insulting readers, I still get a few weekly DMs requesting my arbitration on some piece of writing. As I said, I’m not a good arbiter. Nor do I have the courage to tell someone they suck. Because most of my life I sucked as a writer, and probably still do, and the minute I believe I don’t suck, I’ll start sucking real bad, and not even more cowbell will cure the fever of suckiness that envelopes this place. My point is that we all start somewhere, and it’s more than likely that this somewhere is a place called Sucksville.
Escaping Sucksville takes thousands of hours of practice and dedication.
One has to love writing and be capable of tolerating a whole lotta suck for what will probably be years. Encouragement will come slowly with progress, as Sucksville fades into the distance with each passing year, and then magically one day that place will be a distant memory.
But writing for fun and writing on Substack, are very different beasts.
One is freeing and open, the other is restricted by the constraints of an audience’s expectations that something will be published, sooner rather than later.
To the DM-ers, spammers, or honest writers who have started or plan to start a Substack that keep contacting me—if you think you’ve put in the hours to escape Sucksville, the rest of this post is for you. Actually, I’m also writing it for me so that I can copy and paste the link to this post as a uniform reply to DMs.
While I’ve done my best to help other writers on here, often sharing the work of some who have become bestsellers when nobody knew who they were, I’ve never accumulated all my tips and tricks on launching a Substack (and setbacks/things I wish I knew in advance) into one concise post.
The following is some friendly advice since people keep soliciting it every week. And mistakes I’ve made on this platform that you don’t have to repeat.
The Good Citizen List For Digital Whoring on Substack
If you want to be a “content creator” good for you. Go and copy and paste other people’s ideas and articles into posts, and give them BREAKING! headlines. Become an aggregator who runs the current things through an ideological slant blender, or summarize PDF books through AI, and pretend to pass the work off as your own. You’ll do well. However, if you want to write on Substack and share your original ideas, you should first be able to write well, express yourself well, and see the world objectively, preferably without getting emotionally attached to any of it. Some people will love it, some will be offended, especially if you endeavor to be honest. If you’ve put in the time and are already out of Sucksville, you’ll eventually find an audience.
If you want lots of readers and their adoration with constant growth you’ll be pegging yourself to a formula that should at least half the time end with hope. People are desperate for it, but too much is dishonest. The balance between honesty and hope will be a tightrope act you’ll have to figure out. The former often undermines the latter. Too much hope, and you’re a lying Pollyanna, and honest people will detect it. No hope at all and people will get depressed and call you a blackpilled doomer because they need others to furnish hope for them. You’ll never win them all.
Readers will quickly have expectations that you must meet. The more you stick to a formula, the more growth you’ll have, and the more they’ll resent you when it becomes tiresome, or you’ve changed in your thinking, but they haven’t. Consider all of this before you start. What is your focus? Who are you writing for and why? Can you keep it up long term when you succeed? Are you endeavoring to be a writer or a carnival performer at the digital whore house? I didn’t think any of this through and made mistakes in the process.
Never put anything behind a paywall until you hit at least 3k-5k dedicated enthusiastic readers. Otherwise, you're wasting good words on nobody. You will not grow with paywalls. Everything must be free for at least a year if you're a part-timer, but maybe six months if you go full-time and promote the hell out of it. Then you can go to one-third paywalled for another year, and bump that up to 50% when you hit at least 10k. Who knows? Maybe you reach that with your first brilliant post. Don’t consider the paywayll as a behavioral nudge for free subscribers, but as a benefit for your patrons. If the free subscribers want the same occasional benefit, they’ll become patrons.
You can try and submit your work for third parties to publish. Make a list of editors of websites that might be willing to share your work with their readers. Otherwise, the only way you can promote the hell out of it is in bestsellers’ comment sections or on Notes, but you won’t get much traction on Notes without subscribers. However, there’s a method to this self-promotion that works and if you ignore this method it will do more harm than good and you don’t want to ruin your brand before you’ve started. Yes, you’re essentially creating a brand. Welcome to digital whoring.
Don't just drop links in the comments of bestsellers with like-minded readers that you seek. People will resent you for it and it will seem like spamming.
Leave a comment 100% related to THEIR post. SHOW THAT YOU’VE READ IT! It’s their readers who will also read it, so if you disrespect their favorite writer, you’re not winning anyone over. If you can make it witty, insightful, and complimentary without seeming like you're just doing it for self-promotion you’re off to a good start. Irreverence and sarcasm worked for me.
You can also do a 'tie-in' to a nonrelated essay if there's connective tissue that you can convincingly create. DO NOT DROP MORE THAN ONE LINK to your Substack in their comments. More than one will appear as desperate spamming. Never drop an unrelated link.
You'll gain the most success by revealing something the author missed to their readers about that subject, a kind of “authoritative cock blocking” without sounding smug or arrogant. You can also just add to what they wrote about (synthesis) and expand on it with a few new ideas you’ve already written about.
Be first. The first good comments will get the most likes. If comments are sorted by "most liked" you've struck gold. If you can speed read the minute someone's post hits your inbox, think on your toes, react, and drop one of the first 10 comments that meet those above criteria, you could be seen/read by hundreds of their readers. That's how I went from 0 to my first 500 in just a month. Lew Rockwell and Jon Rappoport later helped me rocket to 5k in just four months. I was fortunate they liked my work. Don’t expect to get lucky.
Once you hit a few hundred, your greatest asset will be your readers. Ask them to share your work, restack, like, etc. But if you've written a gem, you won't even have to. They're going to want others to read it. They will want to show people what they've uncovered/discovered, "You have to read this essay!" etc.
Key elements: Title, subtitle, and top image are essential. You can make titles literal like a news agency, but expect those kinds of readers. I opted for abstract, metaphor, mysterious, irreverent, anything sticky that pokes the curious minds. Grab ‘em by the balls at the start or the humans will not stay to read anything. If you succeed with the title, subtitle, image, and first sentences, they'll keep reading. The thesis of an essay used to be afforded placement leeway, but not anymore. The first paragraph, maybe the second. That’s all they’ll give you before they get fidgety, lose focus, and succumb to their hyper-digi-flitting tuned attention span, especially if they’re under 35. Don’t worry too much about them, it’s probably thoughtful readers you’re after anyway.
Have a hook that drags them along to the next paragraph and so on. The seeds you plant at the start must be watered throughout in a way so that they don't see what’s growing. And if they stick around until the end, reward them with something that won't make them regret it—a revelation, an insight, a controversy, a new way of seeing something old, a call to action. They'll finally see the thing you planted at the start as you return to it to connect it all. It should feel like a 'full circle' journey.
Congratulations you’ve hit a thousand readers! By now you’ve had at least one essay go “viral” for your reach. Readers are enthusiastic, you’ve found a loyal audience for your writing. You’re flying high, like Leslie Chow in Hangover 3, but instead of screaming “I love cocaine!” you’re screaming “I love Substack!” Right now is a good time to resist the urge for dopamine highs. The more readers you accumulate, the more restrictive things become. At least once a month you’re going to start getting rage-filled hate emails for your views—especially if they’re honest. Laugh it off and delete them. Do not respond. You didn’t offend anyone. Taking offense is a choice by people who can’t control their emotions. Most of them are lying and trying to emotionally blackmail you for the upper hand. If you do respond don’t call them a silly feminist cunt, but it’s best to never respond. Their rage will reveal everything about them as people and nothing about your work. If they haven’t unsubscribed, take them out of your email list and send them to normie purgatory where they belong.
If you write a political or history Stack, don't write about Jews, Israel, or Zionism. If you do it, do it at the start, but don't make it all about that, unless that’s your focus—also don’t expect to monetize it or be prepared to be demonetized by Stripe. It’s the only forbidden subject, and you should ask yourself why. If you do it later once you've launched be prepared to lose more subscribers than you gain (especially boomers and Gen Xers who refuse to deprogram from their Rockefeller-planted malware). You’ll spend a year rebuilding with zero net growth. See the opening of this post. That's been my lesson for the past year.
Branding: Create an avatar, alias, or anon figure while you still can, or if you want to use a real photo (I recommend not) and your real name and you grow big, be prepared for the notoriety, celebrity, and all the wrath, harassment, doxing that might come with it if you tell some upsetting truths-which is really what all truths are in the end. If you get big enough, it will affect those around you, family, loved ones etc. Sadly, that’s the world we live in. You can’t change the world you’re living in. Maybe your words can alter the future. Expect to lose your primary source of income if you tell too many truths under your real name.
Already Launch a dud Stack? If you’ve already launched and have a dozen posts with no likes (no readers), do a rebrand, unpublish all the posts, and republish under your new branding. Start with your strongest first. Rewrite and edit like crazy so it’s tight. There’s always fat to trim. Promote the hell out of it as mentioned above (in Substacks where other like-minded readers lurk).
Do not publish a second essay until you have 50 new subscribers from that first essay, and so on. By the fifth or sixth you should hit 500 with a moderate network effect...if they're good and you promote the hell out of each one. Also, get creative with the name of your Stack. Think about it long and hard because you’ll be married to it forever. Just about anything creative or abstract will create more interest as it shows a creative and original mind is probably running things.
Congratulations, you’ve hit at least 3k subscribers. It’s time to consider a paywall if you want to monetize your creative works. You can still offer the majority for free. As soon as you do your official paid subscriber launch, get ready for everything to change. You now have to deal with Stripe, another ruthless Silicon Valley monopoly run by a Zionist, the IRS, and paid readers who are loyal and dedicated enough to take a piece of plastic out of their wallets as a show of appreciation for what you do, with the hope you’ll continue to do it.
You’re rolling. You’re flying. You’ve hit bestseller status with at least 100 paid subscribers. Congratulations. Unless you’re a noticer and historical revisionist, you’re headed for the moon. Nothing can stop you! Except Stripe, and Substack if you suddenly start noticing and they get the call from Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL.
Use an editor—Grammarly or something similar to alert you to misspellings, and basic errors that you will miss. Mistakes can turn off readers. Never use it to rewrite your paragraphs or style or change your voice.
READ THE COMMENTS your readers leave under your posts, for at least 36 hours after publishing, but maybe 48 if you aren’t swamped. Like each comment every reader leaves (even if you don’t agree with it), to let them know you’ve read it and as a way to let them know you appreciate them taking the time to leave a comment. DO NOT delete comments unless you’re a wussy. Delete spam and reply to borderline spammers with warnings. Comments are awesome and you should encourage them. I’m often blown away by the thought and insight my readers provide to me, and other readers with their comments. It’s one of the most rewarding aspects of this journey, and as I’ve told my readers I often gain more from their comments and link shares than I do from a month of reading other Substacks. You’d be surprised how many bestsellers completely IGNORE their reader comments. It’s sad. Respond to as many as you can, especially early on. Engage with them, not just for the sake of it, but so you can learn from them and use their insights to help you grow.
Chats! I know many of you are thinking about Chats, but I can’t do it. For me, that’s what the comment section is for. If you want to “double your growth” for Substack’s revenue print, knock yourself out, but you’d better make those Chats damn interesting, and compelling or you’ll risk being resented for wasting people’s time by dumping stupid shit in their inbox. Then you’ll have to manage the infighting, shitposting, violent threats, and spamming, which all takes away valuable time from your writing.
Speaking of dumping too much in people’s inboxes…never publish willy-nilly unless you’re a daily news aggregator, in which case, you’re not a writer. Don’t run and chase the current thing for clicks without thinking about it first. It’s often best to WAIT and see what happens in the days that follow. Chances are that your reaction to the events will be embarrassingly “wrong” or at least miscalculated. And days later you’ll cringe at your words. Those who rush to be first are usually very wrong. This has happened to me more than once, and it’s not fun but can be humbling. It’s best to avoid it with patience, thought, and observation. Then more thought, writing, rewriting, and more thought again. Just as it’s dying down (about 72 hours later in our goldfish world), release the thoughtful beast.
Never use AI to write anything. It simply cannot write like humans and you'll be figured out in one or two posts. Zerohedge just published a three-part Substack series (by someone named Joshua Stylman) on the evolution of psyops and cultural control (engineering reality) that was written in part by GPT’s easily recognizable (completely uncreative) latest Canvas engine. The topic of the post was relevant and interesting, but not the author’s ideas, which someone with a lengthy academic background on the subject could easily detect. The delivery was molded on the garbage writing patterns of GPT (“A was not merely B, but also C; systemic, systematic, dynastic, not just X, but Y and Z; a tapestry of…” I could on for a whole post), which made it very difficult to read past a few paragraphs.
I should do an entire post on how to spot AI writing with GPT which I learned from trying to assemble a Suvivialist Bible, that compiled the top ten most important Survivalist and self-reliance books into one giant 2000 page tome. I gave up after a few weeks (on the first chapter) when I could see the writing was terrible and it would require a year to edit. Still, I could make a list of its 50 most repetitive buzzwords, and style elements. If you read the words not merely this, but that, or not just X, but Y, more than once in an essay, it was written by GPT. If it’s in every paragraph like Joshua Stylman’s work, you’ll be able to see the entire thing was written by a machine with the occasional quote to break things up. What’s sad in this case, is the writer’s substack is dedicated to exposing technocracy. He takes the books of Patrick Wood (technocracy.news) and others and uses AI to pump out a summarized post every other day, each as formulaic and technically mimetic as the last. Anyone who has tested LLM engine writing capabilities will discover fraud very quickly. DO NOT use AI to write unless your goal is unoriginal writing and “content creation” via a tepid assembly line to monetize people’s attention who don’t care they’re reading the words of a machine. You might fool the dummies for a week, or a month, or even a year, but eventually, they’ll discover you’re just pumping out machine summaries and it will bite you in the ass for not disclosing it. Unless they don’t care in which case you’ve accumulated a lot of normie readers and are worse off than a content creator in the digital whore house. And yes, Grammarly has an AI engine now, but you can shut it off.
That’s it. This is all the advice I have. And I’m no arbiter of what’s good. And neither are the masses who might flock to read your glorious works by the millions.
I know a musician and audio engineer who started a podcast that had zero listeners. It was a daily podcast, 15 minutes each morning. A stream-of-consciousness purge to go with his morning coffee. He did it for a year with not one single human listening, but he didn’t care. I think he went for a full 18 months before stopping when his second kid was born. When I asked him how many listeners or subscribers he got via the Podcast RSS connector (which connects to all the major platforms) he proudly replied, “None.”
But he loved it!
If you love writing, go on then, do it.
But do it for you. Not for growth, or dopamine, or money, or anyone else’s affirmation.
It’s the only way you’ll be free to still love writing.
<run ending: a revelation, an insight, a controversy, a new way of seeing something old, a call to action .exe here>
<run program: hopium release v.1.19.2025 here>
Good luck and Godspeed.
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How I Escaped Sucksville
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