Substack certainly makes increasing your readership easy and fast, and it also supposedly gives you a chance to easily monetise your content. It would undoubtedly get my blog readership to rapidly increase by a multiple of what it is now within months, there is no doubt about it. Why will I not use it then? A few reasons. The very first one is one I expect only very few people to believe or understand, and is enough for me personally, but I will endeavour to “show my working out” so to speak, insofar as it’s even possible to do so, in the hope of being more likely to be understood. Here it is:
I have had at least 30 years of experience in noticing how subterfuge, infiltration and generally the destruction of almost any organisation, ideology or movement works. I worked undercover for a period of over a year and covering more than a few instances over that same three decades, and it has given me a certain “spider sense” for things that are suspect. It ranges from something as seemingly innocuous as intrinsic wokeism in a science fiction writer’s work, to the much more nefarious machinations of big tech, and Substack just set off my “spidey sense” from the beginning. Since I understand that’s not enough for you to be anywhere near convinced, here are a few of the verifiable issues:
- They can take down the whole thing or your blog whenever they want for any reason
- You have zero control of that nor any of the algorithms that may be applicable to your blog
- The monetisation is a trap: the allure for you to “make money” while segregating your content (a form of self-censorship really) while also siphoning off funds from supposedly “right-wing” or nationalists or whatever. Suppose you want to write things that are politically liable to get you cancelled, you put it behind a pay wall and you’re likely “safer” right? In theory. In practice, you create a partial echo chamber that gives you the illusion of reach but that will tend to plateau and then stagnate and if it doesn’t it can always be jigged this way or that to be returned to a maximum threshold you would have no way of knowing.
- The net result is that it is syphoning off funds from people who might be supportive of your ideas, while keeping that community “contained” identified and so on. And if you are say a Christian Nationalist looking to read CN blogs, you will tend to subscribe to a few and spend quite a chunk of cash on reading say 4 guys. That will probably all be linked with each other so you will be kept in a substack ghetto of sorts.
It really is just another gatekeeping mechanism. Remember that the purposes of gatekeepers are as follows:
- Act as a pressure release valve. People venting online and feeling part of a “community” are less likely to organise in real life and reach the torches and pitchforks levels of “removing WEF leaders” as an example.
- Get a list of the “activists” and their details and weaknesses.
- Syphon money, time and energy from them. This way they are renedered less effective.
- Infiltrate and sabotage their plans, ideology, and concepts by introducing questions, doubts, alternatives with variant or divergent concepts that lead down dead ends or fruitless endeavours and/or criminalise the entire movement to some degree or other. See grifters and feds like Gavin McInnes, Milo, Emo Jones, Tay-Tay Marshall, the now exposed Gary Voris that syphoned money, time and supposedly Catholic intent from how many tend if not hundreds of thousands of people? Alex Jones made a whole career out of it. And in my estimation Substack is just the latest iteration in soft format.
And this is why I will continue blogging here. Which does not mean I would not use the Substack notes and so on to see if I can’t use it to divert readership here without actually blogging there. And why the blog posts here will remain free, with any income generated by this blog being the organic result of you either supporting directly my intents like the Kurganate (see left sidebar), or the valley of the saints (see pinned post above) buying membership to Kurgan-TV, or buying some of my books and so on.
It is undoubtedly harder to generate a regular and loyal readership on your own as I do here and especially with my almost direct contempt of SEO practices, but, one thing I can be certain of is that my regular readership here is genuine, organic, and made of real people and not Chinese bots. You, of course, can help by sharing my posts using the share button at the bottom, which only takes two clicks, and if you do, you have my thanks.
I hope that aside from the specifics of Substack, the above is also useful as a model to recognise the inevitable dozens of impostors, time wasters and so on. I recently engaged a “Substacker” that while presenting as a “Hardcore Trad” after a few exchanges demonstrated himself to be nothing more than a complete gasbag of Novus Ordo lies, illogic and nonsense, writing overlong posts of “nuanced” bullshit that serve only to vampirically absorb genuine interest and energy from the young men who might be curious about Catholicism to begin with. A Milo or a Mark Bisone, or Emo Jones, or Taylor Marshall, or the aforementioned Gary Voris, invariably ensure that any potential new real crusaders ends up turning away from anything even reminding him of the word Catholic. And that is their purpose.
A thousand actual Catholic men all in the same geographical location, absent any Fed infiltration, would be founding new countries. Do you really think that it is a coincidence that sedevacantist were identified by the Satanic FBI as the most dangerous group? I mean it’s not as if it’s Catholics decapitating innocent children, raping and pillaging and making terrorist attacks around the world. So how does that compute? The only way it makes sense is if you realise that Sedes are the only ones with the actual spiritual truth that immunises you from all the lies of the Satanists. Which is also why the fake Pope and his imps hate us worse than any other group, including muslims, atheists and Jews.
I know, I know, I digress, but at least loom at substack with a critical eye will you?
It certainly looks risky to rely on it solely. in a gatekeeping / honeypot way.
But why not use it as a funnel to direct traffic this way? Post there too, but always also here, link each article there here. Slightly more work but may help reach a larger audience faster, as initially mentioned.
If it could be automated it might be worth doing. But my time to learn such things is limited and I am tendentially probably moving more towards clubs and stones as refinements of useful technology than artificial intelligence and fancy online stuff.