The Overlords of Under-Loved Content

or, how to get your Substack an AI reach-around, while it's taken from behind

“Content’s Algorithmic Overlord”, Bing Image Creator Dall.E.3 (modified)

It was not too long ago that certain influential Substack accounts, some of which had been given financial incentives to come onto the platform, banded together to mount a coup so they could control what the rest of us could say. This resulted from prioritising influence over substance. It’s a mistake humanity has repeated ever since civilisation made charisma a tool of power.

If your content is not getting any traction and you don’t know why there’s a sure way to get some direct feedback. Consult the Substack chat bot. The thought of your content disappearing into a black hole might be ameliorated when you feel the black hole radiating some artificial love.

This is about my question and answer session with the Substack AI.

Taking it up with the Substack Bot

I don’t really work the ‘notes’ feature on Substack beyond announcing my new publications, and very occasionally, engaging with an article or comment. Here I admit to a basic misunderstanding, because I thought that ‘notes’ was about promoting writing, rather than a social media add-on trading in validation. For the sake of my education I took the step I am now recommending to you and asked the Substack bot for clarification.

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My Question # 1: Why do none of my notes ever get any kind of reaction? It is as if my work and comments are invisible.

Substack Bot Answer

It sounds frustrating […] Here are a few tips that might help increase engagement:

1. Content Quality: Ensure your notes are engaging and valuable to your audience. Sometimes, tweaking the content to be more relatable or topical can help. 2. Frequency and Timing: Posting regularly and at times when your audience is most active can increase visibility. 3. Promotion: Share your notes on other social platforms or within your newsletters to drive more traffic to them. 4. Engage with Others: Engaging with other writers and their content can encourage them to interact with your notes. 5. Feedback: Ask your current followers for feedback on what they'd like to see or how you can improve your notes.

If you're doing all this and still not seeing any reactions, it might be worth checking your profile settings to ensure everything is set up correctly for maximum visibility.

My Takeaways

So the bot immediately homes in on the insecurity of writers - that they may not be good enough. Now, I can be objective and consider the possibility my content is not up to snuff, but it’s obvious that quality is incidental to visibility. The word salad that infects my feed and the meme clubs that seem to live there - are not what I find ‘valuable’, but they are determined by the algorithm to be there anyway.

There is an inherent danger in handing the keys to people who will become whoever they need to be for the sake of engagement. That sort of insincerity can be automated as

Sarah Cook

points out.

The bot’s advice seems anti-niche and also, the emphasis on BYOA (Bring Your Own Audience), is reminiscent of a network marketing scheme. Actually, ‘multi-level marking’ is less of an analogy and more of a perfect description. It succeeds and fails for all the same reasons, and to the same categories, the few and the many. Personally I am not a joiner of clubs so am a bit stymied.

This does seem to mean that those who arrive with a large following from elsewhere will get a disproportionate share of platform exposure. So what is being rewarded here is not writing content but social media networking. In fact, if you don’t actively build a network your work will become invisible and wither on the vine. The reason that happens is because the reach of a publication is not related to the number of people who ever found anything you said interesting.

My engagement with others is ad-hoc and I have no campaign strategy or agenda. I am not going to cynically look for reciprocity and bristle at the suggestion that I should seek feedback on my notes, presumably, just so I can slipstream what is already popular. I would not slay at being a mood.

Admittedly, it was to labour under a misapprehension to believe the ethos of Substack was to find an audience, while remaining authentic. That’s not what the Substack chat bot is saying and it’s not what anyone who writes about gaming the system are saying either. Sure, they do talk about finding one’s ‘voice’, but that is merely garnish on the fact, that for most of us, our main value to the platform is as potential net consumers.

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My Question # 2: Why would I have to actively promote when this is a platform that is meant to promote content?

Substack Bot Answer

Substack provides tools to help promote your content, but active promotion by writers themselves can significantly enhance visibility and engagement. Here are a few reasons why self-promotion is beneficial:

1. Targeted Reach: You know your audience best. Promoting your content on platforms where your potential readers are active can help attract more targeted subscribers. 2. Community Building: Engaging directly with your audience through social media and other channels helps build a community around your publication, fostering loyalty and increasing engagement. 3. Complementing Discovery Tools: While Substack is working on improving discovery features, leveraging external platforms can complement these efforts and maximize your content's reach. 4. Control Over Messaging: Promoting your own content allows you to control the narrative and highlight what’s unique about your publication.

It's a combined effort where Substack's tools and your own promotional strategies work together to help you grow your readership.

My Takeaways

How do I know my audience before I have found them? Do I recognise them as mirror images of myself or do I observe a group and just become a mirror image of them? Isn’t publishing on Substack enough to constitute “promoting … content on platforms where … potential readers are active” ?

Starting a separate marketing campaign seems to defeat the purpose of being on platform ostensibly dedicated to writing.

This focus on outreach makes a lot of sense to a platform that wants to grow into something bigger regardless of what that might be. It is not a strategy that gives proportionate exposure to many of those who are already here. Those who are producing electronic copy, blithely assuming there is an audience ready to stumble on their content, and blow it up.

On Discoverability

The concept of ‘discoverability’ is fascinating to me but I need to break it down to explain why. First I want to discuss demand and supply-side capacities.

• Every reader is limited by time, reading speed and attention. They therefore have a capacity to read a certain volume of content. Of course it will vary widely but across large numbers we could determine the reading capacity of the total audience. We could measure content consumption or demand as a function of reader numbers.

• Every writer is also limited by time, writing speed etc., with the capacity to produce a certain volume of content. In principle the total content production capacity on the platform could be determined - we could measure the rate of content production as a function of author numbers.

So shouldn’t it be a case of mapping demand to the supply? If Substack are seeking to improve discoverability, the question is, for whom and at whose expense? For a given volume of readers we can surmise there is a capacity limit on what can be discovered. If, as is obviously the case, some content is going to be more ‘discoverable’ than others, ‘discoverability’ is about how the exposure to readers, is shared. For writers it’s clearly not a simple matter of having a share of platform exposure proportional to their follower/subscriber base.

To ‘work on discoverability’ can only mean working on the redistribution of exposure, but since any skewing is already coming from the algorithms, the needle will never move in favour of the small publications. This is precisely because, visibility is the reward reserved for those bring people to the platform, rather than metrics related to the production of content.

Agreeable validation can be found on any platform with a bit of strategic ‘liking’ so what is the difference here? Isn’t it just another algorithm to embody groupthink?

The most successful accounts appear to be those who use notes like X and publish memes. I have extremely mixed feelings about Elon Musk and at one point was very critical of his protectionist stance against Substack. Now I see that from his perspective Substack content is a trojan horse, not to smuggle in the Greeks, but to extract tweeters.

Those who are not here to build an echo chamber, ‘community’ and don’t just want to be read by people who agree with them, remain misfits. The fact that they might be good writers is of no consequence.

It’s odd that lack of visibility is being sold as a benefit that allows the writer to control the narrative. It’s a bit like a surgeon telling you that amputating your legs will save you a lot of walking. Ironically, what ‘is unique about your publication’ seems likely to get it hidden, because engagement for anything truly ‘unique’ cannot be predicted.

All transmit and no receive is not messaging anymore than a phone in a locked office is taking calls. You can say what you want in a sound proof cell but it will never constitute a message.

I persisted …

3

My Question # 3: I only have … subscribers but it seems that they never see my content online despite being active. I am not asking about promotion but visibility.

Substack Bot Answer

If your subscribers are active but not seeing your content, there could be a few technical reasons to consider:

… Ensure that your posts are being sent as email newsletters. […] your emails could be landing in their spam folders. […] Verify that your publication is not set to Private mode. […] it might be helpful to gather more specific feedback from your subscribers about what they are experiencing. This can help pinpoint the issue more effectively.

My Takeaways

I should reach out to people to get feedback on their lack of feedback. Presumably if that does not work I should seek feedback on their lack of feedback on their lack of feedback. But what if I get feedback, on their lack of feedback on their lack of feedback, but no feedback on their lack of feedback? I didn’t think to ask.

4

My Question # 4: I don't want to pester subscribers with needy requests. What I want to know is that if I publish a note is it possible that nobody sees it? Because that seems to be happening with me.

Substack Bot Answer

Notes on Substack are public and designed to be visible in various places such as your Substack profile, the Substack app, and on the web. However, […] a few reasons why your notes might not be getting the visibility you expect:

[Notes] visibility in subscribers' Home feeds can vary based on engagement levels and the volume of content other writers they follow are posting. High activity from others might make your notes less prominent. […] If subscribers typically do not engage with notes (either yours or in general), they might not notice new ones easily. Engagement tends to boost visibility in feeds. […] Subscribers […] can receive push notifications in the Substack app, but these are not guaranteed for every note published.

[…]

To ensure your notes are visible, you might consider linking to them in your regular email newsletters or mentioning them in other communications to direct traffic to your notes. This can help increase their visibility and engagement.

My Takeaways

This is about the environment over which nobody has any control apart from those who devise the algorithms. It seems to me that Substack may be withholding exposure from those who are not recruiting users from elsewhere. Of course, it was not a revelation to find that those who don’t read notes will not see them, but it might explain why my dad never engages with my content. Although, come to think of it, he was illiterate when alive.

Again, the chat bot response is about ‘subscribers’, avoiding my question about general visibility. It’s not that I am expecting there to be massive reach but surely exposure should be greater than one’s own subscriber base.

I will think about the practical tip about putting the notes promoting my newsletter in a newsletter. Perhaps I could have a newsletter, dedicated to the notes, that are promoting my newsletters, that are promoting my notes.

5

My Question # 5: I think you are saying (by omission) that it is possible that I publish a note and nobody sees it. My next question is 'why'. I am not asking about specifics of whether I need a direct strategy - my point is that if a note is posted publicly, probabilistically many people will see it... unless it is being hidden by the algorithm.

Substack Bot Answer

You're correct in noting that if a note is posted publicly, it should theoretically be visible to anyone who visits your Substack profile or follows you. However, visibility in the feeds of subscribers can indeed be influenced by several factors, including the platform's algorithms, which prioritize content based on engagement and other metrics.

Here’s why a note might not be seen by many, even if it's public:

1. Algorithm Influence: Substack's algorithms might prioritize notes from writers with higher engagement or more subscribers, which can affect the visibility of notes from smaller publications. 2. User Behavior: Subscribers may primarily interact with their email inboxes and might not frequently check the Substack app or website where notes are more prominently featured. 3. Engagement Levels: Low engagement with previous posts can lead to lower visibility for new posts, as the system might deem them less likely to interest readers based on past interactions.

While the platform does not intentionally hide any public content, these factors can create a scenario where notes are less visible than expected. Engaging directly with your audience through other means can help increase the visibility of your notes.

My Takeaways

It clearly makes sense that the number of followers (as a metric of readability) should factor in the account’s visibility but to preserve proportionality a writer’s exposure should be a multiple of those numbers. If the impressions on your post are less than the number of subscribers surely there is a problem.

Sometimes I go out in search of the content produced by people I subscribe to. Frequently, I have seen something by an author I follow in passing, but because I didn’t click on it immediately, it becomes almost impossible to find later. I subscribe to a lot of publications but my online feed is almost exclusively comprised of large accounts, many of which I do not follow.

If the larger publications have exposure and their content is being shared, why would they need a disproportionate access to requisitioning other people’s audience? This means that scalability must become increasingly uneven which can only result in convergence on a new ‘mainstream’, with some publications getting exponential growth at the expense of most others, whose reach is eroded to incentivise external user recruitment.

This is why there are so many publications about how to play the algorithm and even the Substack bot is effectively saying the system has to be gamed. Why not just fix it? Because they need to retain the ability to drive certain publications and it is what enables them to give some established celebrity writers sign-on incentives or advances against predicted subscriptions. The spiral of oblivion awaits those of us who will not, or cannot, play along. So what does the bot say?

6

My Question # 6: Then why do I see notes from people who I don’t follow, subscribe to or engage with?

Substack Bot Answer

Seeing notes from people you neither follow nor subscribe to can happen due to a few reasons related to how Substack's discovery and recommendation systems work:

1. Discovery Features: Substack may showcase notes from a variety of writers in the Home feed or in other discovery sections of the app and website to introduce readers to new content they might find interesting. 2. Algorithm Recommendations: The platform's algorithms might recommend notes based on general popularity, topics similar to those you've shown interest in, or even randomly to diversify the content you see. 3. Community and Network Effects: Notes that are restacked or highly engaged with by others in the Substack community can appear in your feed, even if you don't directly follow the original poster.

These features are designed to enhance the user experience by exposing readers to a broader range of voices and topics, which can help foster a more vibrant and interconnected community on the platform.

My Takeaways

My feed is mainly a subset of things that many other people like to read and those I subscribe to don’t generally appear. That subset includes topics that are either similar or different to what I read - which is the same as saying my preferences are not factored in. The only thing that does matter is the probability of monetisation.

The answer closes out with me being assured that this is designed to ‘enhance user experience’, promote a ‘range of voices and topics’, plus create a ‘vibrant and connected community’. The reality is that these algorithmic interventions have the opposite effect and it is not accidental.

The danger that geometric growth brings to any business model is that distribution becomes bigger than the product throughput. This can take various forms including ‘overtrading’ but in this case it is bottling up supply, to reserve demand for the big accounts. Therefore, to meet demand the natural response is for the product to become increasingly homogenised, with the only metric being how efficiently we can get more of the same. That much was confirmed by the answer to my next question.

7

My Question #7: So the algorithm promotes some notes but suppresses others?

Substack Bot Answer

The algorithm on Substack doesn't intentionally suppress notes, but it does prioritize content in ways that can affect visibility. Here’s how it generally works:

1. Engagement Metrics: Notes that receive more engagement (likes, comments, restacks) may be more likely to appear prominently in feeds. 2. Relevance: The algorithm may also prioritize notes based on perceived relevance to individual users, which can include factors like topics of interest or previous interactions with certain writers. 3. Discovery: The goal of the algorithm is also to introduce readers to new content and writers, which can sometimes mean that notes from less-followed writers are featured alongside those from more popular ones.

The system is designed to balance personal relevance with discovery, aiming to create a dynamic and engaging experience for all users.

My Takeaways

If some content is promoted then the content that isn’t, is ipso facto, suppressed. From the platform’s perspective, it’s better that users are active in quick-fire exchanges rather than reading or writing long-form content taking up bandwidth. Discovery of small accounts may exist on an ad-hoc basis but that has to be lip service.

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My Question #8: 'Prioritising' is semantics. You are engineering engagement.

Substack Bot Answer

You're right to point out that prioritizing certain content can influence engagement patterns. Substack's goal with these algorithms is to enhance user experience by surfacing content that is likely to be relevant and engaging to each reader. This approach aims to support both readers and writers by helping readers discover content they love and helping writers reach audiences that will value their work. It's a balance between fostering discovery and maintaining the quality of what readers see, which can indeed feel like engineering engagement to optimize the platform's value for everyone involved.

My Takeaways

This supports my claim that fostering discovery cannot possibly be the objective. Yes I know this answer is designed to stroke in all the right places and cause me to express sweet relief that the engineering of engagement is for my own good.

It’s true that some fledgling authors get massive exposure very quickly but it doesn’t always seem to be for their writing. Find your own examples and see if you can figure out why.

I am not alone in this and many people have expressed similar sentiments, although unlike me, without unashamedly turning it into long-form content. I am sure this will not be the last platform to under-deliver on it’s promise to be author-centric.

Of course it will be different next time…