How Substack Is Helping Rig the Midterms
A rundown of every change I've noted. PLEASE add yours in a comment. (Recording at the end)
Periodically, I compile a newsletter to outline changes I’ve noticed within the Substack universe. Buckle up, readers. Today’s is a doozy.
Readers can find links to other newsletters in this series below:
Substack is aggressively throttling progressive/left-leaning reach.
In Spring 2025, I wrote about my growth plateau. I went from generating over 1,000 new subscribers per month via Substack to net-zero.
Other Substackers shared their very-similar-looking plateaus. We talked about it across Substack, who denied it it was happening.
This throttling is still the norm, at least for me. Since I shared my original 2025 findings, my net subscribers did not budge more than 100 subs in either direction. (I purged 8,000 inactive accounts a couple of months ago. More on that in a bit.)
My Note reach has also tanked, though admittedly I don’t use the Notes feature as often as recommended. I didn’t come to this platform for Facebook Circa 2016 or Twitter Circa 2010. I’m here because I’m a writer who wants to write long-form pieces. Coming from me, I’m not sure whether this metric actually represents more throttling. I’ll be interested to hear other experiences in the comments.
Substack is ignoring a creator’s permission-to-comment settings in the app.
I’m not the only female on Substack who locks comments to paid subscribers only. Speaking for myself, I chose to lock comments from the beginning because I grew up in an environment where words were a constant form of abuse. To be effective with this work, limiting the troll’s primary avenue of abuse is essential to my mental health.
Because of this, I have trained myself to ALWAYS toggle Paid replies only before posting notes. During June/July 2026, Substack reset my permissions to Anyone can reply more than once. I had to fire up my laptop to reset them back to paid.
If I never know whether my comment-reply settings will be respected, will I post as often? What might I not say in an effort to protect my mental health? How will I self-censor to keep potential trolls at bay?
I believe Substack is testing this tactic with smaller progressive/left-leaning creators to enable more effective trolling in the lead-up to the midterms.
So far, I haven’t noticed this issue when I use Substack on my laptop. Which means I am increasingly choosing my laptop over the app.
A word about Paid replies only.
While we’re here, let’s address the sense of entitlement so many people feel to other people’s work. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been accused of “forcing people to pay to talk to me” and “thinking I’m all that” and “suppressing dialogue.” Every creator has the right to protect and share her work however she wants.
As I have stated near-constantly, nobody has to pay to be here. I regularly share links to The Leaderboard, where anyone with a Substack account can earn paid access by sharing this work. The typical response? “I don’t have time to work for you for free.”
Here’s a link to The Leaderboard for readers who’d like paid access without spending a cent.
Some people really need to check their sense of entitlement. End of rant.
Substack is actively platforming bots.
Before I purged over 8,000 inactive accounts, I noticed something weird. I had hundreds of subscribers in Nigeria. Quite a few in Russia. Those accounts vanished after my purge, likely because they were connected to bot farms.
Bots don’t always troll. Sometimes, bot farm operators subscribe to information to impact algorithms. If bots never open messages, open rates drop, which usually impacts a creator’s reach with the next iteration of the algorithm.
Newsletter hygiene is important, especially in the lead-up to the most important election of our lifetimes. If you haven’t purged inactive accounts lately, NOW is the time.
Also: Bots can become trolls any time. I expect lots of passive bot accounts to become active troll accounts in the coming months.
Paid subscribers - including founding members - do not receive all of my newsletters.
I’ve lost count of how many people have unsubscribed as paying because I’m not getting your emails that I PAID FOR.
I can’t pin this one on Substack, though they could be complicit. This could just as likely be another fascist ring-kissing company like Google auto-spamming progressive and left-leaning information during delivery.
My regular posting schedule on Substack is as follows:
I always offer one newsletter per weekday, Monday through Thursday.
I always offer TWO newsletters on Friday.
While I may post on weekends, I try to avoid working to cleanse my creative palate. I might also offer an extra post Monday through Thursday to share an event recording.
If you aren’t receiving regularly scheduled emails, please check spam folders for messages from me. Often, email delivery algorithms need to be told a message isn’t spam a few times for it to compute. Users can do this by either moving a message from spam to the inbox or by checking a box marked Not Spam.
FOR THE BILLIONTH TIME, STOP USING GMAIL AND GOOGLE.
Readers can find multiple secure alternatives to fascist US tech products at European Alternatives HERE.
Help your connections better use Substack. Click the button below and share this newsletter.
Substack is randomly unsubscribing users.
So far, I’ve seen this one of two ways.
Substack removes subscribers without their knowledge or consent. Example: One Substacker’s wife was randomly unsubscribed from their partner’s work. Tech companies take advantage of overwhelmed users every day. It is IMPERATIVE to keep an off-Substack list of subscriptions. I keep mine in my calendar along with renewal dates, but a handwritten list or other method works, too.
Substack sends an auto-message from a creator’s account asking if a user wants to continue to subscribe. (This happened to me yesterday with Harry Dunn.) I clicked that I wanted to continue to subscribe, only to receive ANOTHER annoying identical message from Substack. Harry may weigh in and say he created those messages, but it’s just as likely another tool for Substack to put its thumb on the midterm scale.
On a related note, I am very stingy with my Substack subscriptions in that I never want to have too many to track. If you have hundreds of subs, take a few minutes and cull the ones you’re no longer reading. Our unwillingness to participate in our own information hygiene allows tech companies to get away with so much fuckery.
Also related: My husband is building his own old-school RSS feed, including his Substack subscriptions. This might be a work-around for some types of fascist algorithmic censorship. We got the idea from Proton’s Substack. Link below:
Once we’ve tested this system, I’ll share how it works.
Another work-around for both non-delivery of emails AND random unsubscribes is my Fast Alert channel. It bypasses algorithms and email delivery by notifying users of every new post directly in their operating system. (Similar to how tech companies push system updates and SOS alerts.)
You can subscribe to my Fast Alert channel by CLICKING HERE.
Substack is actively asking creators for more conservative voices.
At least one person has told me someone in their orbit has been approached for leads to more conservative creators. (You know, as if platforming Andrew Tate and actual Nazis isn’t enough.)
Mark Andreessen is a fascist billionaire. He loudly and aggressively supports this regime. His venture capital firm a16z owns a large minority stake in Substack. This money IS IMPACTING Substack’s agenda and direction, no matter what the three original owners say.
While our long-term goal must be to exit this platform, we’re not going to accomplish that before the midterms.
I am seeing conservative creators in my newsfeed. IT IS NOT BECAUSE I HAVE CLICKED ON THAT TYPE OF INFORMATION.
I have a long history with social media, especially for someone my age. I’ve always been an early adopter.
So I am highly attuned to changes in my newsfeeds. Whenever possible, I curate them aggressively.
The ONLY reason a conservative voice would be inserted in my newsfeed is because Substack put it there. Period. (I’m also confident they aren’t randomly inserting my Substack into a Nazi’s newsfeed. But whatever.)
Be on the lookout for fascist-leaning creators in your newsfeeds. The BLOCK button is a beautiful thing.
This article breaks my heart. As I moved away from mainstream news I have depended on Substack authors. 😕
Still reading the article but I noticed the part, “Because of this, I have trained myself to ALWAYS toggle Paid replies only before posting notes. During June/July 2026, Substack reset my permissions to Anyone can reply more than once. I had to fire up my laptop to reset them back to paid.”
I noticed that in the past two-three months, Substack has removed my changed positions about “background” color when people land on my page and who I received emails from - all without notification or asking me. For example, I’d set my color schemed to be green; it got changed back to Substack’s default color - a color more resembling my Alma mater’s UT orange, which is waaaay too reminiscent of the Orange inhabitant that skulks around the White House these days. I haven’t customized a lot of things (I don’t have a paywall) but I, too, notice the throttling of any comments about sexual abuse, rape and the politicians, billionaires & Regular Joe abusers that indulge - topics about which I have commented and authored Notes (which is almost all I use, not long-form, much to my regret at not being better able to compose thoughts into longer, coherent writing.)
As a former software developer and manager at Apple, Dell, Cisco and a few other companies that have run on tech for the past 30 years (I’m an old dinosaur) I would guess that Substack has pushed out a major re-write of their algorithm and part of that is resetting “certain” accounts to default settings. Now whose account is chosen to be treated like like is almost surely political, and based on “left” leaning or, heaven-forbid! Progressive ideas. Why the push’s to “default” settings? I suspect because the default settings aren’t going to immediately lead to readership growth. “Default settings” may also be periodically checked to see if there’s been customization to indicate the level of author involvement in using the platform.
Of course, all of this is probably driven by AI - so nobody on the dev team may even know what in the hell is going on. They may have already had their jobs replaced by bots.
But yes, overall, I completely agree with you - Substack has changed its algorithm significantly in the past two years and now it is much more like Twitter used to be in mid-2010s and Facebook was ten-twenty years ago. With billionaires like Marc Andressen on Substack’s board (and there are other odious ones, too, whose names I don’t recall at the moment) there is no doubt that Andressen and the Substack board can literally NOT AFFORD to have anyone other than Trump in power. They’d all go to jail for election interference as well as poisoning the public discourse with promotion of fake news and promotion of demagoguery.