A Hundred Mostly Cyborgs
Looks like bots are on the move again.
Ages ago, clear back on November 14th, I published 101 Bullshit Personas, which had to do with the influx of a hundred new followers in a matter of eight hours. Another hundred have appeared, spread out over a week, and there’s one clear sign of bot activity in my mentions. This was drafted in the last couple days of November and I just got around to posting it now.
So let’s all *HUGE SIGH OF EXASPERATION*, and have a look at this most unwanted indication of Substack’s growing importance.
Attention Conservation Notice:
There’s a bit of being pleased about audience growth behind this, but mostly I’m tired of 1) clumsy bots posing as humans, 2) free speech absolutism assclowns who can’t accept that a digital kick to the curb is precisely the right response to assclownery, and 3) THOSE people, who are still not getting name checked here. If you’re as annoyed as I am, come right in and get comfy …
October’s Bot Burst:
A simple infographic here, a steady curve with a sudden jump completely unrelated to some sort external event is obviously synthetic.
Current Growth:
So here’s what’s happened in the last eight days - an average of twelve a day?
The period before the October bot burst averages 5.6 followers per day and the period after was 5.4 per day. See that nice straight line, minus botburst October, and probable botburst November? That is a NORMAL rate for my account, and there is also a norm of that being one or two new subscribers and three to five new followers.
Eight days, twelve subscribers? That’s reasonable.
And a final bit of quantitive information … views per day. The red dot is the October Botburst and the green dot is November. Overall I’m writing much less and the views reflect that. So followers going UP but they are not going BACK into older work, which is fishy. There’s a subscriber/follower/views ratio, that is harder to characterize, but it also seems out of whack to me this last week.
Qualitative Observations:
There are a couple of things that have happened beyond these quantitive things.
Remember Ignoring Irrelevant Assclowns back in September 28th? Welp, what I thought was a forged document was real. So there was a court inflection point on … November 19th. I’ve had some appeals, I’ve got a precedent setting 1st Amendment ruling (case law!), and now by gosh, maybe there will be a writ of mandamus. Sadly, the attempt at the state supreme court several years ago didn’t work and I doubt I’ll ever get the appeal/supremes/mandamus hat trick. I’m filing that with my one for the thumb Spook Superbowl ring wish - getting my hooks into the SVR, having previously punched out FSB and GRU.
And then there’s this AI driven object … a new subscriber on November 26th, nine hours before I started drafting this. The email used has a fairly rare unisex Romania name, and it ain’t Selia.
And this three week old account has published two articles. Substack will only let me post one of the two but this is … well … I report, you decide.
Conclusion:
This makes me unspeakably sad; real networks of real humans can do so many things. A network flooded with AI slop can maybe still impress a search engine, but humans pretty quickly disengage. This cartoon I saw the other day was good enough that I kept it - the Twitter cesspool is drying quickly, and the sickness of that environment is going to follow the departing audience here, to Bluesky, and to any other permissive social media environment where humans congregate.
Did you read Anders Puck Neilsen: Responsible Social Media? A good site will have these three things.
Aspiration for an unbiased algorithm.
Transparent moderation.
Good public APIs.
And I’ve never said much, but I’ve been coding small scrapers for Substack for a couple years. I recently discovered that there’s some Python for accessing the Substack API, which is functional, but neither documented nor public. I would like to see it documented, but I’m unsure how much I would use it. I did a LOT of work programming for Twitter, fourteen years total, and almost ten of that with Python. Just by its nature I don’t think Substack will follow the same self-destructive path Twitter did, but I have no patience left in that area for real humans behaving badly, let alone the bots that are becoming harder to detect with each new large language model.
Whatever happens for Substack, it looks like the post election mourning is over. Suddenly there’s motion all over the place, people are envisioning what happens in eight weeks … and they’re nervous.