101 Bullshit Personas

Substack has NOT cleaned up their October 17th infestation

I have been watching my audience - that’s YOU, and your fellow travelers, periodically stopping to be pleased about the growth. All Eight Hundred Of You was on October 9th, and now here we are five weeks later … and I think there are a thousand of you.

But I’m sure there are 101 bullshit accounts that arrived in an eight hour period on October 17th, and I’m wondering why Substack hasn’t pruned this mass of bots.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Grousing about the previously pristine Substack experience being polluted by automated shitpipes. Only of interest to those who care about audience size and maintaining quality.

Incursion:

There it is. 839 followers/subscribers on the 16th, then I blinked and there were 101 new ones. Other people also reported startling increases, curiously all of them were about the same size as mine - right around one eighth of the prior audience. That’s obviously automation, not messy humans.

How did I immediately know this is bullshit? Because this entire year I’ve gained about five new followers a day, and the original 50/50 ratio of followers to subscribers has slid to 60/40. I think there are about 990 legit audience members as I write this and just 395 subscribers - stuck like glue to that 60/40 ratio. Getting 101 new contacts in a day … and two subscribers? Obvious Notes funny business.

Lingering:

So why is Substack letting this tranche of bullshit persona linger? I am just speculating here, but I think some people DO get big bursts of new followers, and they don’t want to step on real users by guessing at the heuristics for spotting and removing the obvious botstorm. They did manage to shut down any additional arrivals, so that makes it even more curious.

Maybe these personas trickled in and then got dispatched all at once - perhaps the bot infestation is pervasive and the only reason we know is that someone slipped on their bot management code. Rather than Substack finding it and shutting it down, maybe the operator is the one who noticed. That leaves a much stickier mess for Substack, who have to work with a time window in which many things moved, but during which only some were illegitimate.

I would give much to be a fly on the wall for meetings at Substack about this. Given that this is a serious platform defense issue, we’ll never know the details - because protecting sources and methods. The best we can hope for is 350 words of corporate speak that comforts the user base while ghosting the problem.

Conclusion:

After months of being confused about the interface, and to be fair it is a TERRIBLE interface, mixing the Substack authoring platform and the Notes social network, I gave in and started using Notes like I did Twitter back when it was fresh and new and fun.

I had done the same with my OG 2017 Mastodon account after the great Twitter exodus of 2022 and I eventually landed an early adopter Bluesky account. Both of those showed early signs of the same asshats that ruined Twitter, I blocked all of those right away. Then less attributable automation popped up, and I have no patience left for that, so those accounts have been idle since mid-2023.

Thus far I’ve kept my Notes clean via a simple expedient - every time I get any one right wing asshat or accelerationist, I click through to their profile, block everyone they boost, then scroll down their followers and block the first thirty or forty I find there. Some of the big names have made Substacks, but blocking them and their early adopters has left me free of the drivel I see other people mentioning.

That will work for organic masses of undesirable humans, but thwarting actual automation requires 1) automation of your own, 2) the sense of how to use it, and 3) the patience to spend the time doing so. I will NOT get caught in another cognitive sink trying to fight off bots. If Substack should be overrun, I’ll still write, but my Notes use will mirror Mastodon/Bluesky - checking a couple times a year to make sure I still have access, no more.

I couldn’t find a photo of 101 dung beetles, let alone one that looked anything like a shot from 101 Dalmatians, so you get a pair of them, doing battle over a rolling ball of poo.