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.
I don't disagree with your theory. I just think it's gay. I'm not a loser who needs substack popularity to feel cool or valued. I let my writing speak for itself and if some people like it thats cool but honestly I write because it is cathartic not because I need validation. I wrote things before substack and I will write things after substack dies.
Also Walt, I think you're unabashed sincerity while it's is somewhat endearing it is also very cringe. I do not like many of your posts/notes because they are simply too cringy and do not appeal to my sensibility. I think restcack for restack is somewhat cringy but am willing to partake in it out of curiosity (Also because I probably get more out of it than you do on an individual level). However, a like cabal just sounds too tryhard and cringy for my taste.
> You do everything ironically. If you did something non-ironically - wrote a deep poem that laid your entire being bare, committed whole-heartedly to a political position you truly believed in - you would be opening yourself up for judgment. Instead, you communicate only by tentatively putting out little feelers, and then, the moment someone starts to frown, retracting them with a “Haha, trolled, I was only joking”. If anyone else does things non-ironically, you deride them as “pretentious” and “cringe”.
I understand some of the feeling. Despite knowing this strategy myself, I have never taken any serious steps to utilize it myself. I delight in whatever engagement I can get and take great pride in every subscriber and like I get through sheer weight of whatever value I am providing. But it is very clear through the years that I in particular, and most people in general, do not have much of a hope of widespread success without additional inputs.
Among those who do gain huge amounts of following, I suspect a significant number of them are benefitting from similar kinds of techniques, or at least used them to jumpstart from a zero-position. Were Bismarck or anyone else to achieve enough of an audience, the organic responses would likely replace the need for manual priming. But until you have that, one has to get clever to cut through the noise.
There are other strategies that don't require cabals. Appearing on more-popular creator's pages, through replies or guest podcasts or whatever, helps both parties and can inspire cross-pollination. Putting more work out into more baskets improves your odds of reaching more eyes. Making a piece that inspires reaction from bigger-accounts can draw a lot of attention to your work. Just asking for more engagement can, like in the article we are commenting on, inspire more engagement.
Your mileage will vary, but in all things marketing is separate from product value. The artist may wish that his work will be appreciated and rewarded for its objective value, but the marketer knows that even great works will never be discovered without something beyond itself to draw eyeballs to it. Imagine putting your book somewhere among the shelves of a library without a cover, and hoping your folio is going to be discovered and appreciated by the masses. It simply doesn't happen without marketing. For every hidden gem discovered there are mountains of slag being served up to the masses. You need more than just good valuable work to get to the surface.
> 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.
I do support everyone clicking the like button for every post they actually like - I do that myself.
I also want Substack to be a meritocratic system where the best content gets more likes and is hauled to the top. But I am not sure if the way to accomplish this is to create circle jerk clubs that collectively like and share their posts.
It sounds like reliving the high school popularity contest all over again. Or, a "revenge of the autistic nerds/theather kids" high school popularity contest.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Substack algorithm had ways to detect and penalize this behavior - I'm sure this tactic was invented a long time ago and deployed countless times since, so preventing this might be the part of social media algorithm design 101.
The thing is art hoes and libtards and any other more cognitively feminine type of content creator will always get and give far more likes. It isn't apples to oranges and this is just the only way that more individualist sperg sort of guys can compete given who reads our shit. We have to make it scalable, centralized, almost industrial.
The best content will still rise to the top. This just raises the floor in a sense. what really matters are organic restacks, comments etc.
Anyway we can test if the algo is penalizing us and adjust our strategy accordingly. I'll be sure to put a capable QA guy on the task. Shouldn't be too hard to assess.
Yeah, I noticed that in our space it's hard to get more than a few k subs if you're not a pro or semi-pro writer (as I described in my Substaxonomy post). But I outside of our space, I often see normie libtard feminist writing like common rants about men with 10k+ subs or 1k+ likes per post.
Thats simply because their content appeals more to the average individual. Walts stuff appeals to high IQ, high openess, low empathy people like myself. It will never have broad appeal to the masses.
nab you don't have to be racist. even I'm not *racist* racist these days
you just need to be willing to like fairly edgy stuff (nothing aggressively wignat etc. but the same level as shit I post). If so I'll gladly take you.
I still need to read this but just have to say that image used is a very slick artwork. Sometimes AI has a flat look but this doesn’t look like purely AI, it’s got a lot of texture. Nice 🤌🤌🤌
There's a second level here. Substack is good for getting subs, but not great for montesiing, apart from direct subs. Beehiiv is better (boosts, ads), plus they don't take a 10% cut.
I think there is potential to aggregate autistic racist content onto a Beehive newsletter, send subs there, then monetise with ads and boosts.
I don't have time to look into this right now but would potentially be interested in the future.
Or if you have a good idea and this is something you'd want to take on yourself using my platforms and branding we could cut a deal. DM if you want to discuss further.
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.
I don't disagree with your theory. I just think it's gay. I'm not a loser who needs substack popularity to feel cool or valued. I let my writing speak for itself and if some people like it thats cool but honestly I write because it is cathartic not because I need validation. I wrote things before substack and I will write things after substack dies.
Also Walt, I think you're unabashed sincerity while it's is somewhat endearing it is also very cringe. I do not like many of your posts/notes because they are simply too cringy and do not appeal to my sensibility. I think restcack for restack is somewhat cringy but am willing to partake in it out of curiosity (Also because I probably get more out of it than you do on an individual level). However, a like cabal just sounds too tryhard and cringy for my taste.
>Also Walt, I think you're unabashed sincerity while it's is somewhat endearing it is also very cringe.
I think the exact opposite: it's the lack of sincerity that is cringe. As Scott Alexander said of slave morality (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean):
> You do everything ironically. If you did something non-ironically - wrote a deep poem that laid your entire being bare, committed whole-heartedly to a political position you truly believed in - you would be opening yourself up for judgment. Instead, you communicate only by tentatively putting out little feelers, and then, the moment someone starts to frown, retracting them with a “Haha, trolled, I was only joking”. If anyone else does things non-ironically, you deride them as “pretentious” and “cringe”.
I understand some of the feeling. Despite knowing this strategy myself, I have never taken any serious steps to utilize it myself. I delight in whatever engagement I can get and take great pride in every subscriber and like I get through sheer weight of whatever value I am providing. But it is very clear through the years that I in particular, and most people in general, do not have much of a hope of widespread success without additional inputs.
Among those who do gain huge amounts of following, I suspect a significant number of them are benefitting from similar kinds of techniques, or at least used them to jumpstart from a zero-position. Were Bismarck or anyone else to achieve enough of an audience, the organic responses would likely replace the need for manual priming. But until you have that, one has to get clever to cut through the noise.
There are other strategies that don't require cabals. Appearing on more-popular creator's pages, through replies or guest podcasts or whatever, helps both parties and can inspire cross-pollination. Putting more work out into more baskets improves your odds of reaching more eyes. Making a piece that inspires reaction from bigger-accounts can draw a lot of attention to your work. Just asking for more engagement can, like in the article we are commenting on, inspire more engagement.
Your mileage will vary, but in all things marketing is separate from product value. The artist may wish that his work will be appreciated and rewarded for its objective value, but the marketer knows that even great works will never be discovered without something beyond itself to draw eyeballs to it. Imagine putting your book somewhere among the shelves of a library without a cover, and hoping your folio is going to be discovered and appreciated by the masses. It simply doesn't happen without marketing. For every hidden gem discovered there are mountains of slag being served up to the masses. You need more than just good valuable work to get to the surface.
We just don’t like *you*. Your shit is insightful enough to read, you’re just not likable.
> 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.
walt comin' in guns blazing
The madman is actually doing it
Walt RIGHT - Rocks. Period.
OD
Not sure what to think about it.
I do support everyone clicking the like button for every post they actually like - I do that myself.
I also want Substack to be a meritocratic system where the best content gets more likes and is hauled to the top. But I am not sure if the way to accomplish this is to create circle jerk clubs that collectively like and share their posts.
It sounds like reliving the high school popularity contest all over again. Or, a "revenge of the autistic nerds/theather kids" high school popularity contest.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Substack algorithm had ways to detect and penalize this behavior - I'm sure this tactic was invented a long time ago and deployed countless times since, so preventing this might be the part of social media algorithm design 101.
The thing is art hoes and libtards and any other more cognitively feminine type of content creator will always get and give far more likes. It isn't apples to oranges and this is just the only way that more individualist sperg sort of guys can compete given who reads our shit. We have to make it scalable, centralized, almost industrial.
The best content will still rise to the top. This just raises the floor in a sense. what really matters are organic restacks, comments etc.
Anyway we can test if the algo is penalizing us and adjust our strategy accordingly. I'll be sure to put a capable QA guy on the task. Shouldn't be too hard to assess.
Yeah, I noticed that in our space it's hard to get more than a few k subs if you're not a pro or semi-pro writer (as I described in my Substaxonomy post). But I outside of our space, I often see normie libtard feminist writing like common rants about men with 10k+ subs or 1k+ likes per post.
Thats simply because their content appeals more to the average individual. Walts stuff appeals to high IQ, high openess, low empathy people like myself. It will never have broad appeal to the masses.
You have to yield to art hoe sensibilities
Yeah that's kind of the subtext I'm sneakin' in here
Ok, let me know if you need any help rebranding, i invented the emo-quit after all.
What if you're autistic but not – except in the eyes of progressives – sufficiently racist?
Can you still, to coin a phrase, participate in this conspiracy against the (Substack-reading) public, and contrivance to raise cloutiness?
Asking for a friend.
nab you don't have to be racist. even I'm not *racist* racist these days
you just need to be willing to like fairly edgy stuff (nothing aggressively wignat etc. but the same level as shit I post). If so I'll gladly take you.
DM if interested.
To be honest, you talk condescendingly of "reply-guys" in your posts/notes, which makes me not want to like or reply to your stuff lol
Nothing wrong with being a reply guy if you do it well, I was one in 2015 for a few months
Never underestimate the power of titties. I'm here to help though. You restack my stuff and I'll restack yours. Mr. Orange Checkmark.
"Far-right ablest, sexist, substacker creates plan to 'conquer' substack"
I still need to read this but just have to say that image used is a very slick artwork. Sometimes AI has a flat look but this doesn’t look like purely AI, it’s got a lot of texture. Nice 🤌🤌🤌
There's a second level here. Substack is good for getting subs, but not great for montesiing, apart from direct subs. Beehiiv is better (boosts, ads), plus they don't take a 10% cut.
I think there is potential to aggregate autistic racist content onto a Beehive newsletter, send subs there, then monetise with ads and boosts.
I don't have time to look into this right now but would potentially be interested in the future.
Or if you have a good idea and this is something you'd want to take on yourself using my platforms and branding we could cut a deal. DM if you want to discuss further.
Lemme join lemme join!
DM'd
Knew you'd be. Will message you on TG.
and prolly 300 tomorrow, babycakes