Can't stand watching or listening to AI generated stuff. Won't do it. Even cartoons are mostly shit now, but I do see a resurgence of hand crafts, and the slow food movements etc. People....people who need people.....
AI videos I've seen are especially disturbing. Then again I'm not into videos much period. I do see a resurgence of nature and working with your hands. These are all fundamentally human. Meanwhile they'll use every trick in the book to keep your eyeball on the screen, but on their side it needs to be on trivialities and distraactions. I'm not sure how long it can go on for
One thing going on is that censorship is becoming a lot more devious. I only had a handful of comments from free subscribers on my last post and they are telling me that when they go to comment they're being told they need to be a paid subscriber to comment.
Thank you for mentioning that. The vast majority of my posts are open to all with the exception of a few usually more autobiographical things. I don't know if people have trouble seeing, liking or commenting on posts. I do feel that for whatever reason, however they are letting substack wither on a vine. Good ideas were proposed early on including pooled funds and bundled subscriptions. A lot of writers on here really evolved their craft in real time and the information I find on here remains some of the most thought provoking and useful on the Internet. But any check of the top posts on the not a movement platform whales, eg Steve Kirsch, Robert Malone and Alex Berenson, will reveal that their most liked and active posts were written in late 2021 or early 2022. Some like Naomi Wolf have managed to keep things fresh with digs into the esoteric. The fundamental problem remains that nothing has changed on an official basis. They'll throw a bone here and there to say okay the jabs might not be that great for everybody but officially still recommended and they are still pushing genocide. This requires ground up solutions...
I bought web hosting for AmySukwan.com a few years back on Dreamhost. It actually predates my substack at the time I was trying to sell my books. It never gained traction at the time as my Facebook followers completely fell off and Amazon seemed to blacklist my content. That said I still have it and still post things on there from time to time. I get a lot of bot and spam comments but if they are not blatant I sometimes even let them through. I back up my substack email signups list on mailerlite on a routine basis. My experience is that most people do not move with you to new platforms though I think a scattershot approach where you either post the same content on multiple platforms or offer perhaps an in depth dive on one or the other is probably the best way to go in these uncertain times. I think part of where substack perhaps tried to thread the needle too much is that while the site was accused of being an antivaxxer web host they actively courted some mainstream types, so some of their biggest revenue earners are on the other side. For example did you know that Emily Oster, yes the Let's have a pandemic Amnesty Emily Oster, is one of the top paid substack writers with supposedly over 193,000 paid subscribers? I visited her ParentData website to check it out. Her paid subs metric sounds obscenely high for the few hundred comments and less than 10 shares that her posts generate, but the ones who do comment are not at all part of an astroturf movement. She has an appeal to liberal parents of young children, with articles on potty training basics and what to do if your child wants to play with toy guns and why do women do a larger share of household chores. It's not that different from my sociology training. She quite smartly is staying far far far away from anything related to childhood vaccines or Covid vaccines or anything else. Substack is so small in comparison to the big fish that it can easily be pressured by those metrics. Paid subs is the only way they make money...
I've heard that Dreamhost, Patreon and other "hosting" platforms have curtailed speech or have resorted to shadowbanning truthers on their platform.
Thanks for the list backup tip.
As a lifelong liberal, I was surprised that, shortly I first joined substack nearly 3 years ago (I think they had been up and running for about 9 months at that time), I got an email from them saying they were a liberal platform and that my posts thus far were very conservative, but they were going to allow me to continue.
That was when I first realized the world had shifted beneath my feet.
That's interesting! I never received any email of any type from substack regarding content. Then again I am fairly opposed to the uniparty as I see it, so my views rarely fit into one or the other. I once considered myself liberal and now seem to be grouped with conservatives in a similar fashion.
I have no idea if DreamHost is throttling my posts. They didn't get noticed, so perhaps they are. Their wordpress generated SEO maximizer drives me a bit nuts though. I have 37% too many long sentences. I used the passive voice in my writing 21% of the time but in proper grammarly style it should be less than 10%. My title is too wordy, or not wordy enough, and doesn't properly explain my post content. On and on it goes until I feel like there's nothing left of a human thought process. It's tiring...
Yes, that email from Substack marks the beginning of my separation from liberals (and conservatives for that matter) and the beginning of seeing it as one big, ugly machine.
Wow, that all came from an SEO maximizer? I've never used one.
I think it's possible that Elon's war on Substack might account for at least some of the drop in traffic, in two different ways. First and most obviously is the throttling of Substack links on Twitter, sorry, "X". Second, and more speculatively, this throttling has motivated a large number of Substackers, particularly the larger names, to adopt custom domains. I don't know for sure but I suspect that visits to custom domains aren't counted towards views on Substack dot com.
I think Elon's substack war does play into it. A lot of substackers post links to twitter, which now both require you to be a twitter user AND require clicking to the external link. This ironically draws traffic away from substack and no doubt a lot of people end up scrolling through X, or twitter due to that. I post some substack links on twitter but my click through is not that much. For now I like to post youtube links on substack for the simple reason that they can be viewed on substack ad free. But I never figured out how to upload a personal video directly onto substack, if that feature ever went live to begin with...
The Federal Reserve is a private entity run by Oligarchs. Read Ed Griffin's excellent history in The Creature from Jekyll Island. Nothing socialist about it (there are rumors as well that it was tied to the sinking of The Titanic, which was originally named another ship).
Yes I read a Lily Bit's great piece regarding the Olympic/Titanic and shared it. I agree. It's capitalist for a very few at the very top and disster for everyone else...
Can't stand watching or listening to AI generated stuff. Won't do it. Even cartoons are mostly shit now, but I do see a resurgence of hand crafts, and the slow food movements etc. People....people who need people.....
AI videos I've seen are especially disturbing. Then again I'm not into videos much period. I do see a resurgence of nature and working with your hands. These are all fundamentally human. Meanwhile they'll use every trick in the book to keep your eyeball on the screen, but on their side it needs to be on trivialities and distraactions. I'm not sure how long it can go on for
One thing going on is that censorship is becoming a lot more devious. I only had a handful of comments from free subscribers on my last post and they are telling me that when they go to comment they're being told they need to be a paid subscriber to comment.
Thank you for mentioning that. The vast majority of my posts are open to all with the exception of a few usually more autobiographical things. I don't know if people have trouble seeing, liking or commenting on posts. I do feel that for whatever reason, however they are letting substack wither on a vine. Good ideas were proposed early on including pooled funds and bundled subscriptions. A lot of writers on here really evolved their craft in real time and the information I find on here remains some of the most thought provoking and useful on the Internet. But any check of the top posts on the not a movement platform whales, eg Steve Kirsch, Robert Malone and Alex Berenson, will reveal that their most liked and active posts were written in late 2021 or early 2022. Some like Naomi Wolf have managed to keep things fresh with digs into the esoteric. The fundamental problem remains that nothing has changed on an official basis. They'll throw a bone here and there to say okay the jabs might not be that great for everybody but officially still recommended and they are still pushing genocide. This requires ground up solutions...
I agree with all of that. I'm looking for a completely independent platform to do this. One that is mine alone. Any suggestions?
I bought web hosting for AmySukwan.com a few years back on Dreamhost. It actually predates my substack at the time I was trying to sell my books. It never gained traction at the time as my Facebook followers completely fell off and Amazon seemed to blacklist my content. That said I still have it and still post things on there from time to time. I get a lot of bot and spam comments but if they are not blatant I sometimes even let them through. I back up my substack email signups list on mailerlite on a routine basis. My experience is that most people do not move with you to new platforms though I think a scattershot approach where you either post the same content on multiple platforms or offer perhaps an in depth dive on one or the other is probably the best way to go in these uncertain times. I think part of where substack perhaps tried to thread the needle too much is that while the site was accused of being an antivaxxer web host they actively courted some mainstream types, so some of their biggest revenue earners are on the other side. For example did you know that Emily Oster, yes the Let's have a pandemic Amnesty Emily Oster, is one of the top paid substack writers with supposedly over 193,000 paid subscribers? I visited her ParentData website to check it out. Her paid subs metric sounds obscenely high for the few hundred comments and less than 10 shares that her posts generate, but the ones who do comment are not at all part of an astroturf movement. She has an appeal to liberal parents of young children, with articles on potty training basics and what to do if your child wants to play with toy guns and why do women do a larger share of household chores. It's not that different from my sociology training. She quite smartly is staying far far far away from anything related to childhood vaccines or Covid vaccines or anything else. Substack is so small in comparison to the big fish that it can easily be pressured by those metrics. Paid subs is the only way they make money...
I've heard that Dreamhost, Patreon and other "hosting" platforms have curtailed speech or have resorted to shadowbanning truthers on their platform.
Thanks for the list backup tip.
As a lifelong liberal, I was surprised that, shortly I first joined substack nearly 3 years ago (I think they had been up and running for about 9 months at that time), I got an email from them saying they were a liberal platform and that my posts thus far were very conservative, but they were going to allow me to continue.
That was when I first realized the world had shifted beneath my feet.
That's interesting! I never received any email of any type from substack regarding content. Then again I am fairly opposed to the uniparty as I see it, so my views rarely fit into one or the other. I once considered myself liberal and now seem to be grouped with conservatives in a similar fashion.
I have no idea if DreamHost is throttling my posts. They didn't get noticed, so perhaps they are. Their wordpress generated SEO maximizer drives me a bit nuts though. I have 37% too many long sentences. I used the passive voice in my writing 21% of the time but in proper grammarly style it should be less than 10%. My title is too wordy, or not wordy enough, and doesn't properly explain my post content. On and on it goes until I feel like there's nothing left of a human thought process. It's tiring...
Yes, that email from Substack marks the beginning of my separation from liberals (and conservatives for that matter) and the beginning of seeing it as one big, ugly machine.
Wow, that all came from an SEO maximizer? I've never used one.
I think it's possible that Elon's war on Substack might account for at least some of the drop in traffic, in two different ways. First and most obviously is the throttling of Substack links on Twitter, sorry, "X". Second, and more speculatively, this throttling has motivated a large number of Substackers, particularly the larger names, to adopt custom domains. I don't know for sure but I suspect that visits to custom domains aren't counted towards views on Substack dot com.
I think Elon's substack war does play into it. A lot of substackers post links to twitter, which now both require you to be a twitter user AND require clicking to the external link. This ironically draws traffic away from substack and no doubt a lot of people end up scrolling through X, or twitter due to that. I post some substack links on twitter but my click through is not that much. For now I like to post youtube links on substack for the simple reason that they can be viewed on substack ad free. But I never figured out how to upload a personal video directly onto substack, if that feature ever went live to begin with...
It's possible to upload video, you just do it using the same interface as uploading images. It isn't exactly ideal though.
Thanks for letting me know that. I tried to upload a video a long time ago and it gave me an error message. Perhaps the video was too long...
Maybe? The one I uploaded was just a few seconds and pretty low-rez.
The economic squeeze is no accident. They are priming the populace to accept UBI, CBDC, and more financial chicanery.
The Federal Reserve is a private entity run by Oligarchs. Read Ed Griffin's excellent history in The Creature from Jekyll Island. Nothing socialist about it (there are rumors as well that it was tied to the sinking of The Titanic, which was originally named another ship).
Yes I read a Lily Bit's great piece regarding the Olympic/Titanic and shared it. I agree. It's capitalist for a very few at the very top and disster for everyone else...