Substack Growth Hacks? Not quite.
The Liminal Trickster Mystic approach to self-sabotage on algorithmic media
This is not going to be another dose of substack growth hacks, tips and tricks, and advertising for my super affordable business coaching business.
Neither will it be a post about how there are no tips and tricks, and you just need to work harder if you want to succeed.
Instead, I’d rather you stopped trying to “succeed” altogether.
Sabotage yourself as an act of rebellion.
It’s a last ditch effort to derail our climate crunching freight train. Stop being profitable.
Adopt a degrowth mindset. It might trickle up.
That’s what a recent bit of Substack drama helped me realize. Not that checkmarks are evil or that succeeding as a writer requires grit and luck or—certainly not—that, wait, there actually is a magic bullet an influencer can sell me. This back and forth helped me recognize my ambitions had been colonized by content promotion algorithms and that this sudden mysterious fixation on growth was actually foreign. Actually unwelcome.
Drama over Substack Growth Hacks?
A few fairly civil shots were fired. Some feelings were hurt. Some divisions were seeded. Accusations of the oncoming “enshittification” of the Substack platform were levied.
More on that later.
The conflict can be summed up with the following two quotes.
Someone replied to me on Notes by saying that it wasn’t fair to those who did not have the bandwidth to publish very often to have to compete with more established writers. They thought they should be given some kind of leg up by the platform, so they could receive the same attention and growth.
“Currently, Substacks are organized via recommendations and number of subscribers or popularity.
A simple change to the UI could help readers like me find new Substacks and writers to follow: A simple timeline menu, for example, or a “just updated” timeline. When the playing ground is level, everyone has a chance, beginners and pros alike.”
Imagine my surprise when Summer highlighted my comment here, without tagging me at that, and then spoke about ego, entitlement, “leg up”.
In short, the quote that spawned Summer Brennan’s essay turned out to be talking about Elizabeth Tai’s own desire to find writers to follow. Not to find readers for her own publication.
Well, ironically, I’m glad the algorithm brought me to this explanation. The piece had rattled around in my head for half a day before I returned to Notes to find it.
Who are these writers that need to be told again and again that they aren’t working hard enough? Who would possibly say they “deserved” an equal audience to an established pro? It seemed too fanciful to be real.
Of course, that was because it wasn’t. I suspect it’s fairly uncommon for anyone to feel entitled to be read, much less paid for their writing, however realistic it may have seemed to the checkmark’d writers who Tai reports helped promote Brennan’s piece.
Of course, I’m only speaking from my own experience, but isn’t the Creatives’ default more aligned with self-aversion rather than self-aggrandizement? Here’s an NIH-published study saying 80% of creatives have a mood disorder. (Take it with a grain of salt, the sample size is pretty small, but still.)
Maybe we project entitlement out of a kind of “not kennough” “dominator culture” overcompensation?
Or maybe we’re simply mired in a productivity culture; battling internalized capitalism.
Could it be that we’re getting that very capitalist programming from the same app that profits off of the content we produce for it as free laborers?
What would happen if we disconnected from its influence and began campaigns of intentional self-sabotage?
I remain down here, in the trenches, with the algorithm promoting all these scammy “how to make it BIG” articles and follower count updates.
Maybe I wouldn’t even care about turning “my hobby into a side hustle into a job” as Brennan writes if Notes wasn’t blatantly promoting content that subtly uses dopamine hits to deprogram my defenses. The infinite scroll that needs more content, of course, does a great job promoting Growth Hack articles. And would you look at that? Nearly every one of those gurus the algorithms cherish share the advice that we should make more content for the infinite scroll. Surely it’s a coincidence that’s how Substack generates revenue.
Paranoid? Yes. But is it the kind where you’re actually right?
I’ve only just realized the degree to which my ambitions on this platform are undergoing “scope creep.” When I started writing, I just wanted enough cash to buy myself a Jamba Juice a month as a cute treat, and enough readers to build a community that could help all of us, me and them, feel a little less alone.
I actually succeeded at that. I won!
But I sometimes feel empty as a Buddhist Hungry Ghost.
Why?
Seems like another UX decision, but not one that the Substack Product Managers have any say in.
It’s a UX decision at the level of global finance. The crappy User Experience of citizenship within global capitalism.
Here’s my negative review.
A growth based economy needs more people making more things all the time. It needs us to be programmed with lack, scarcity and separation. To feel like we always need a little more than we have.
That constant yearning can be transmuted into profit. Craving represents an untapped resource. It can help pay back the interest on those Central Bank loans from which all currency originates.
Haven’t you noticed? Any time someone displays a neat skill, don’t you instantly think, “you should share that on social media. I bet you could make money doing it.”
We’re like addicts constantly reminded of our fix. And yes, we’ve received a terminal liver disease diagnosis, but we can’t quit drinking.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to Substack as a platform. Connecting with other Liminal Trickster Mystics has added resilience to the Creekmasons and to my emotional life.
It’s worth noting however that Substack’s friendliness to writers has a shelf-life. As the comments on the Note above highlight, Substack has been fun partly because it’s still in the early stages of enshittification. That’s Corey Doctorow’s term for the progression of business models apparently inevitably traversed by any platform that makes its coin connecting creators to audiences.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Enshittification, of course, that is mandated by the fiduciary responsibility public companies have to their shareholders to forever maximize profits.
Do we have the same responsibility to society? The same mandate for infinite growth? Can the planet—and our mental health—survive it?
More from Brennan’s article.
While I can certainly relate to the frustration of not being able to devote the time you want to your newsletter, the reality is that if you want to build a readership, you do have to publish.
What I’ve explored so far in this essay doesn’t necessarily represent new insights, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone codify intentional self-sabotage as a righteous way to navigate being a creator in algorithmic recommendation culture.
But it is righteous to self-sabotage, provided you feel a little called toward it. And you probably wouldn’t have made it this far in the article if you weren’t.
The fact is that infinite growth on a finite planet is the definition of unsustainable. So how can we stop trying to scale the success of our projects from day one? As Douglas Rushkoff often says, scale is the problem. Algae scales up to destroy the ecosystem of a lake. Cancer scales to kill its host.
Admittedly, it’s a balancing act. There is a certain amount of self sabotage we want in order to subvert surveillance capitalism and stay intentionally small, tight knit, vibey and true to our values…
But that’s balanced against self-sabotage that is rooted in not valuing our art and our effort and our specialness to the degree it deserves.
If you put a lot of work into a piece, perhaps it deserves the best chance possible at being seen.
When you approach the line demarcating clickbait, however, you’re executing a crime against the climate.
“My commitment is not to consistency, it’s to Truth.” – Gandhi
Here’s the thing. The concrete takeaway:
The most basic advice that the Surveillance Capitalists (and the coaches who teach being a good pawn) promote is well worth ignoring.
So what if you get penalized by your platform of choice’s algorithm for not posting consistently?
You may have heard that the first clock towers were aggressively vandalized. The artisans who saw them springing up in their little towns knew that those bells served the factory bosses who built the towers, not them.
They knew that clock time would force them to abandon their biorhythms and become productive, but replaceable, cogs in someone else’s profit machine.
It’s a good analogy for the demand to produce content daily for social apps’ various recommendation algorithms. Is your commitment to pleasing the machines, or is it to making sincere work that you’re authentically proud of?
Even shadow-banned, you still have a chance to make that one genuine connection that turns into an active collaborator in your community.
Even without virality, you can still find the others.
And hey, if you follow in
jt’s footsteps and join the Creekmasons, we can have each others’ backs when the biorhythms call for contraction. Emotionally, spiritually, and creatively.
Ultimately, the kind of self-sabotage I’m promoting in place of “Growth Hacks” comes down to checking in with your body. If you feel like making something, make something! If you feel like resting for a day, a week, or a month, rest.
To borrow a metaphor from Daniel Pinchbeck, it’s what the cells in our body do when they’re keeping us healthy: they do what they’re called to do.
What can happen naturally when we stop listening to the urge to expand, profit and monetize that’s programmed into us?
We serve The All instead of the economy.
Abundance follows.
Geoff Gallinger writes poems, essays and fiction and has said a time or two that a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing from SF State qualifies them perfectly for being a pizza driver. That sounds like self-deprecation, but hours a day completely alone in a beater car with an audiobook and a notepad for company are actually a good approximation of a “room of one’s own.”
Being home isn’t too bad either; their daughter and wife will always be their primary audience.