Fifteen Hundred Of You
Musings on Substack growth & statistics.
I fell asleep New Years Eve with 1,498 followers and when I awoke the next morning there were 1,501. Some things have changed here on Substack since the 2024 election. Let’s have a quick look and then a think about what it means.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Just some random SNA on you, constant reader. You can skip this unless you’re looking for “growth hacker” stuff.
Growth & Trends:
The follower to subscriber ratio was always close to 3:2 for the first half of 2024, then that slowly diverged to the 1074:426 (5:2) seen today. That big jump on October 17th is a bot storm that was covered in 101 Bullshit Personas, and there was a more subtle wave a bit later that’s in A Hundred Mostly Cyborgs.
There have been some fitful, ineffective efforts to bring the toxic stew from Space Karen’s Xitter (say: shitter) to both Bluesky and here. The people who do that sort of thing are lazy, and I am not. I get the least little hint of it, I will look at the source, block all of the dirtbag influencers they follow, and then block them.
Prognostication:
The fitful efforts to invade and weaponize the environments of Bluesky and Substack apparently ARE taking hold, I’m just not seeing it personally, thanks to my trigger happy blocking habits. This I know because I see others on both platforms complaining about such things. The motivation for would-be manipulators to get this done is intense.
Much like the 843 Afghans who crowded aboard this C-17 a couple years ago, many of the newcomers on both platforms are refugees fleeing conflict. They’re coming from a much larger, conflicted space into ones that Anders Puck Nielsen would describe as Responsible Social Media. The smaller players who have new users and engagement as their key performance indicators are in danger. AI gets a little smoother each day and a portion of that WILL leak through any barriers they create. Substack, which has very different ideas about engagement and revenue, will respond much more quickly and Notes will likely remain a decent place to congregate.
Conclusion:
The notion of a “global village” used to turn up in feel good outreach for various issues. The reality of global flat networks like Facebook and Twitter is that the worst behavior possible becomes the norm. The only global network for English speakers that isn’t a total mess is LinkedIn. It is a multifaceted partial mess.
APN is right about Responsible Social Media, but I’m taking it a step further - any platform can do that. The only ones that will endure have structural features that prevent their Twitterization. Substack has a different revenue model, the Fediverse is naturally compartmentalized in a fashion akin to IRL human communities. I think there will be more of this, as we all see the evils of the digital cesspools of today.