My Plan to Conquer Substack
Draw upon the strength of The Medelink Cartel
tl;dr - I’m building a team to scalably juice Substack engagement metrics.
Send me a DM if you want in. My general philosophy for this follows below.
You guys are really fucking terrible at consistently liking my content.
I can’t for the life of me understand why this is, because you certainly aren’t disloyal—I track engagement metrics quite obsessively, and regularly observe the same several hundred people reading my articles literal minutes after they drop. And not even in their email client, mind you, but on Substack itself, which means these rascals have that lovely red heart right in front of their face and are *still* denying Walter the aplomb he so obviously craves, when all it would cost them is a slight wag of the finger.
But I’ll not waste the time of my mercurial and steely-hearted readership with maudlin appeals to slave morality. Instead I’ll rely on good old-fashioned shame.
Consider the following:
Not long ago the attractive teenager
returned to Substack dot com after nuking her enormous first account because she was on her period or something. Within a few days of her return Layla had accumulated ~150 followers—roughly a tenth her former count—and with her debut post (a beautiful quatrain in free verse) managed to rack up no less than sixty likes in less than a week. That’s more than I have on my charming gonzo piece about overcoming my drug addiction!I suppose there’s just no beating adolescent star power. But Layla and her many many dozens of imitators so tediously over the drinking age also boast a secret weapon—the simple fact that BPD art hoes have each other’s back and never hesitate to like each other’s shit, even when they’re way too lazy to actually read it.
Hell, they like each other’s shit even when each girl transparently despises the other and greatly enjoys calling her an untalented slut, because for art hoes liking each other’s Substack posts is sort of like guys giving each other The Nod.
Now let’s compare that to you fellers. It certainly doesn’t take much to get you to spend six hours arguing about Jews in my comments section. I was likewise able to convince 127 of you to pay me many hundreds of dollars to join my racist pirate-themed professional fraternity. At this point I also consider many of you my close friends and confidantes, and you’ve shared with me your deepest hopes, dreams, and insecurities.
But like my Substack posts?
“Well jeez, Walt, you’re being kind of weird and needy with that!”
No. Fuck you. This publication steadfastly honors the legacy of the 2015 Alt Right, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a bunch of xanax-munching teenage girls show us up like this—particularly when half of these broads are obvious Tumblr refugees. Fifteen years ago we put the Fear of God into their cheugy elder sisters, and the time is ripe for a similar show of force to prove this platform belongs to Autistic Racists.
Naturally we’ll leave the barbaric ethos of 4chan behind us alongside the tiki torches and undercuts. We’re genteel middle-aged men now, and with that comes a certain obligation to project power with dignity and restraint. So we’ll mog their engagement ratios, but we’ll do so from a respectful age-appropriate distance. More importantly, we’ll make it look effortless—my pal
might call this sprezzatura.So how are we going to do this?
First you’ll join my new Telegram clique, which I’ve dubbed The Medelink Cartel.
Within this group we’ll dump all articles we want pumped into a single thread, where we’ll proceed to like everything en masse while ejecting and publicly shaming any scoundrels caught free riding (excepting obvious caveats for freedom of conscience).
Restacks will require a more sophisticated approach and I’m still ironing out the deets, but you can rest assured that whatever emerges will be scalable and efficient.
Then once we get enough of you boys in the group I’ll authorize a special task force of The Tortuga Society’s top data scientists and engineers to assess data collected from Medelink member surveys and put together a strategy to game the Notes algorithm. I’ll also begin to negotiate alliances with prominent Substackers and we’ll secure from them a specified quantity of restacks / month (for a curated selection of our own posts) in exchange for giving our ally many dozens if not hundreds of likes on all his articles.
Honestly the possibilities abound and I’m very excited. If successful this will not only expand our presence on Substack but also provide a workable model for herding autistic racist cats while showcasing the viability of my proposed honor framework.
What will it take to get into Medelink?
Basically I need to confirm you’re cool, which means a quick glance at your profile to confirm you aren’t a retarded shitposter or liberal.
You’ll also need to like fifteen of my own articles, which I’ll collate in a draft post I’ll send to anyone who messages me asking to join the Cartel. And that’s basically it.
Reach out through Substack DMs if you’re interested.
Before people think Bismarck is off on a vanity project here, there are significant promotional reasons why an updoot-cabal would be incredibly profitable for those participating in it.
That the function is called a "Like" is misleading, as it is more a "Promote" button. There have been experiments done where as little as 10 updoots on a social media post within the first hour or two of its creation could be enough to tickle the algorithm into serving it up to a much-wider audience than otherwise. It's a form of priming the pump, guerilla marketing, and can be the difference between a forgotten flop and a viral success. It has little to do with actual emotions and more a decision by the reader, "Would you like more people to see this?"
The black-hat technique is to just hire bot farms or bio-bot Indians to do the updooting. But recruiting from genuine supporters and encouraging networked support is just a tactic that many good and independent creators do to carve out that initial priming. It's simply a more organized form of telling people to "Like and Subscribe", or enticing bigger-names to promote your material, or the general Substack reminders to do so in virtually every article. Making these organized groups is incredibly common among independent authors, who are often fans plied with review-copies in return for their honest reviews, shares, and updoots. When done these ways, it preserves the foundational purpose of the Like button, which is to promote things genuine people find valuable enough to click an extra button over.
I regularly comment on Bismarck articles because I am interested enough to read them and enjoy the thoughts they inspire, and also because it purges my feed of much unwanted dross polluting it. I accidentally poison it myself by succumbing to the urge to reply to opinions I dislike on occasion. By carefully curating a group of based gentlemen (and ladies) who actively interact with Bismarck's work, the algorithm on Substack at least will start associating them together and direct readers to that net of content more frequently. That in itself is a potential value proposition for both updooter and creator.
Anyway, it's a fair plan and, even now, people can see the fruits of at least imploring people quite directly to Like things in social media.
We just don’t like *you*. Your shit is insightful enough to read, you’re just not likable.