{"id":1019,"date":"2025-12-01T08:32:35","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T13:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2025-12-01T08:32:35","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T13:32:35","slug":"once-burned-twice-shy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/2025\/12\/01\/once-burned-twice-shy\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Burned, Twice Shy"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE LONGER I REMAIN ON SUBSTACK<\/a> THE MORE I REALIZE what a petrie dish for the worst society has to offer it has become.<\/p>\n

I tried out two public sites offering writers the opportunity to get a wider audience for their work, Medium<\/a> and Substack.\u00a0 Not wanting to duplicate my efforts, and feeling Substack had better tools and a wider reach, I gave up on Medium.\u00a0 Maybe that was a mistake.<\/p>\n

The radio is perhaps my primary source for information as well as entertainment, and hearing references to noted personalities and journalists like Julie Kelly<\/a> having Substack pages helped push me in that direction.<\/p>\n

However, a harsh reality has struck.\u00a0 As was recommended to me by another (unnamed purposely) Substack\u00a0 member, my audience is not<\/em> other Substackers!\u00a0 The recommendation made by this respondent to my post was to start mentioning my Substack page<\/a>\u00a0on other<\/em> social media sites. Ugh.\u00a0 But that’s the world today: You have to put yourself out there and then drive the eyeballs to you.<\/p>\n

Pause for a moment to mention in a semi-hypocritical way, that I despise<\/em> “social media.”<\/p>\n

My fault was in thinking that Substack wasn’t social media, but was a platform for serious writers.\u00a0 At first, the founders attempted to deny the fact, but then co-founder Hamish McKenzie<\/a> on the Substack blog admitted<\/a> that it was a social media platform, after all.<\/p>\n

In her article “We’ve been thinking about Substack all wrong<\/a>,” author Isabelle Roughol writes,<\/p>\n

Substack pretends to be the CMS that powers the new independent media era, when it’s really a platform of the old scale era. The second you look at Substack as social media, it starts to look a whole lot better. I’m even ready to argue that as social platforms go, Substack is one of the better ones for creators in a field that is notoriously exploitative. It’s easy to use out of the box (sort of). It enables fast growth (that’s at least half real). It provides transparent(ish) monetisation. It lets you (mostly) own your audience list. It doesn’t cost you a thing until you earn something (then it takes quite a bit of it). That’s why I see little harm in larger publishers such as\u00a0New York Magazine<\/a>\u00a0trying out Substack as part of a broader social portfolio or creators using it as a process blog, without intending to make it their main income.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She includes a nifty hand-drawn graphic:<\/p>\n

\"sketch:<\/a>

Isabelle Roughol’s sketch on Substack’s promise-vs-reality<\/p><\/div>\n

I have personally experienced her observation that “It enables fast growth (that’s at least half real).”\u00a0 Over the past few months, I’ve seen substantial “growth” in (free) subscribers, yet a cursory examination of those new subscribers suggests that 50% of them aren’t real.\u00a0 They are ‘bots, scammers, or both.\u00a0 Yes, I have been scammed<\/a>!<\/p>\n

My “Spidey sense” is now heightened.\u00a0 For the time being, I continue to write on Substack, but I don’t respond to subscribers until I’ve vetted them.\u00a0 That simply means that I check their profile page and check to see how many posts they’ve written.\u00a0 If the number is zero, I disregard them as troublemakers, miscreants, or maybe even criminals.\u00a0 In other words, I ignore them.<\/p>\n

Fool me once, shame on you.\u00a0 Fool me twice, shame on me!<\/p>\n

The sheer irony of all this is that it seems I’ve come full circle.\u00a0 I founded this site\/page in 1996.\u00a0 Substack arrived much, much later — in 2017.\u00a0 The beauty of having my own site is that I control everything about it.\u00a0 I’ve just never tried to promote it.\u00a0 So, in my unnamed source’s view, perhaps I should just drop Substack and focus on publishing and promoting my own content.\u00a0 If I can’t believe Substack’s subscription metrics, why should I bother?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE LONGER I REMAIN ON SUBSTACK THE MORE I REALIZE what a petrie dish for the worst society has to offer it has become. I tried out two public sites offering writers the opportunity to get a wider audience for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mfna.org\/rfo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}