The Thumb on the Scale

It Found Me Here, Too

Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.

I’m not unfamiliar with my content being suppressed/hidden so that it’s extremely difficult for new readers to discover it. It’s happened to me on nearly every platform. I’m not gonna share all the details here because that would be tedious. I’m gonna skip ahead to the latest wrinkle.

I hesitated coming to Substack for quite a while. What I did not need was another time-consuming commitment which would not bear fruit. Long story short: I did eventually come to Substack. After about a year here, I had made some friends and found more great stacks than I had time to read. But engagement was anemic.

In Henry’s Sneak Peeks, I consistently shared chapters from my sci-fi time travel series. After 12 weeks, I realized Substackers don’t much care to read prose fiction—at least serialized, on a website. My articles on Iron Age Unfolding fared better. Two and sometimes three times the traffic. I did gain subscribers, at a snail’s pace. I’d gain a couple, lose a couple, weekly. I stuck with it because growth was happening, however maddeningly slow.

Then, all of a sudden, a topic I had been blogging about for 15 years became popular. My numbers, relatively speaking, exploded.

Every day for a month and change Iron Age Unfolding’s engagement improved. My email inbox stacked up tons of notifications telling me about likes, comments, and new subscribers. I had to change my notification settings to reduce the flooding of my inbox. Three-to-five new subscriptions a day, whereas I had been netting maybe one every other month before. And those new subscribers boosted my open rate from about 20% to 33%. Each new traffic report was higher than the last. If an article got over 100 views during my first year here, that was pretty good. Now I was getting 400, 600, 900 views on articles. One passed a thousand views; one was approaching that milestone; one was climbing toward 3,000 views. My articles went from a couple likes and comments per, to 20-30 comments per, and 27-87 likes per. My book sales were unaffected, but I did seem to be building an audience. Which was great, because I hope to crowdfund for my graphic novel this fall, and according to my research: “You have to build a crowd before you try to fund.”

These numbers are probably minor league to many of the popular stacks, but from my perspective, this growth was viral. Finally, I was finding my audience! Or, at least, it was finding me.

Then somebody turned off a switch somewhere. No new subscribers. Views essentially frozen. No restacks, or almost none. Traffic typically slows down on weekends, but the brakes locked up on a weekday when my numbers were rocketing upwards, freezing them in mid-climb. This was about as normal and natural as the 3AM vertical spikes in Biden “votes” after the polls closed in November 2020.

New subscribers now are even more rare than they were before my stack briefly caught fire. I’m thankful for the subscribers I do have, of course, but it’s kinda’ cruel to let me see what my stack’s growth could be without my work being rendered nigh-undiscoverable. Shades of what happens on Amazon every time one of my books cracks the top 10. (Others ride that momentum to perma-visible status, thousands of reviews, and probably gargantuan sales numbers.)

“We must keep right-wing masculinity out of the marketplace of ideas!'"

There’s nothing I can do about it on either platform. I can’t even prove that it was orchestrated. The average reader might even assume this is all coincidence, or my wild imagination, or whatever. I guess the true cause of this situation doesn’t ultimately matter. What matters is, I’ve got 257 subscribers here, but no chance of gaining significantly more on this platform, unless something changes.

"BUILD YOUR OWN PLATFORMS!" I've certainly heard that advice enough. And I’ve got my own platform, but since I first began blogging there, Goolag has done to my traffic what the overlords at Substack just did here. UPDATE: Here’s an article about Goolag’s current tactic: using AI to plagiarize other sites’ content and redirect searchers to its own derivative pages.

Probably the worst aspect of this development is, I had just created Tales of the Earthbound—a stack purpose-built to share my graphic novel(s). It has been frozen in a state of indefinite obscurity—at least if nothing changes.

(Silver lining is: I don’t have nearly as many emails to sort through.)

I have to figure out how to fix this, but the solution is elusive at this time. (No, I don’t need an e-book/webinar/exclusive training package about increasing web traffic in a meritocratic Utopia.) I’ve got readers to write for here, but little prospect of attracting any more, here. Gab is a virtual ghost town since Elon bought Twatter, and frankly, was never very helpful after the Wild West days when it was in beta, anyway. Twatter/X keeps asking me to get “verified,” implying that they’ll stop hiding my tweets if I do. I don’t much trust them, but maybe I should try that. Options are limited. This has convinced me I do need to start using the Virtual Pulp site for more than reviewing other authors’ books, but unlike Field of Dreams, nobody will come just because I build it. And plug it. And link it. And SEO-it.

Changes must be made. I don’t know exactly what changes, but they might manifest here in some way.

Thanks for reading.