Substack is the Perfect Internet Addiction
Substack est Perfecta Vitium Interretiale
Substack is weird. It’s a blogging version of Twitter, with hopefuls reposting, liking, and commenting on articles of the popular in the hope that they themselves will be elevated by their obsequiousness. The false gushing is obnoxious in its obviousness. Every day you will see readers repost articles that are described as “the best thing they have ever read” or “the very best thing ever posted on Substack like ever”, on and on it goes. I find most of the articles that I stumble across on this medium to be very poorly written, unoriginal, and displaying the piercing wit of a German border official.
The Substack creators have designed a hell of a time trap for people though, and I have to admire their creativity. They have combined all the worst elements of Reddit and Twitter into a blogging medium, and given writers and podcasters the ability to be easily paid for their efforts. It’s a heady mix. You have internet addiction on the one hand coupled with income generation on the other. You can become the coke dealer and the user all at the same time, and without the messy throwing up in a dump truck at 3am.
I wrote on my now dead website that I believed Substack was a concerted effort to corral awful wrong thinking people together in one space where they could then be controlled, identified and perhaps dealt with. I still see no reason to suspect otherwise, but yet here I am. I wonder if being this level of a hypocrite is punished in hell.
So plans for my Substack sojourn. I have enabled subscriptions and yesterday a long term reader of my work paid me some money, so now I’m seriously buggered. My plans going forward are to continue to post free articles here and then to relaunch my long dead podcast under another name. Then after a yet to be confirmed time period I will put the podcast behind a paywall. That is the idea at this point. Let me know how much big fat donkey balls you think this plan sucks.
I won’t be adding luring visuals to any of my posts. I won’t be playing the suck up game to anyone else, so if you’re reposting my stuff in order to get your little cup of attention, haha, sux to be u. We’ll see how this goes but I’m kinda feeling like your average Wehrmacht general on the eve of Barborossa who wasn’t a dimwit.
I dont really know why your old site died (can you tell us?) but i don't think substack is that much of a catastrophe, from what little o know of it. Whatever the site lures are, i have ignored them so far and just have five or so bloggers ive subscribed to. The email versions of latest posts seem handy. I rarely subscribe to online content as too many people overprice themselves. If its above $5 a month then absolutely forget it. $1 sounds fair. I'll reward good content but i'd like to keep my capital free to support other content too.
In terms of a coralling agenda, that's backfired on them bigtime. Since Hillarys deep-state first teamed up with Zuckerberg and co to stamp out dissent, the alternate platforms have just multiplied. Some like long reads, sone quick snaps, some video, some audio. Its whack-a-mole and they can't win. People have even managed to turn tiktok into a platform for dissent.
And as far as i can tell, less and less people give a shit about the censors now. All the friendships and relationships have already been broken. All the firings, all the movings and deplatformings. And we've survived with our little huddles of true believers.
I say proceed as normal, and price any paid articles low. Don't get greedy and dont get obsessed with the attention game. Publish another book or article collection of PRD. That might be a good side-play. And do the podcast, get Cappy on. Even though i don't always agree with you, you are interesting and that's rare.
All the best. Sincerely, a longtime reader and occassional commentator with a history of stupid old pseudonyms.
I know Adam didn't want advice on resurrecting his old site so he can ignore as desired, but I've done some WordPress development and it looks like the old site has a plugin that needs a newer version of PHP than the site's environment is running. Might be a simple fix - go into the server control panel (not WP) and see if there's a PHP version option. Change it to PHP 8 - something.