Hey, thank you, that's very kind. I've been here over a year and this is really the first of this type of thing I've seen. The more we can all be sensitized to it and not accepting of it, the better off we are. The Substack thing says all the right things, and one hopes that means they will also act on them.
Glad you are back! I wonder how many people the bots (I don't think "hannah williams" is the only bot) have chased away from Substack, and who deployed them.
This was so helpful and insightful! Thank you for the mention. I was indeed talking about "Hannah". I didn't want to be wrong, so I didn't mention the name at first. I never subscribed, because to me it felt fishy that ALL the content was locked in a paywall. That is something we should be wary of. People want to first glimpse at what you offer as a writer or artist. They're not going to just blindly pay you not knowing if it's worth their time and money.
You really put this all in the right perspective, Tom. I like that you tried to make contact first, since it was a questionable account, but not 100 percent verifiable. This is one benefit of having a tighter knit community, is that we're all talking, watching out for one another and within what little power we have trying to keep things sane around these parts. Win!
That's it, isn't it Brian? We see something weird, we check with others, and then we act. I want no part of mob rule or chasing witches, but if we see a devil in our midst ...
I saw all those Hannah Williams likes on my posts over the past couple of weeks and thought I was trending. Damn you, Tom, for crashing me back to Earth.
This might be the most timely post I’ve ever read here.
Over the past few days (maybe a week?) I’ve been receiving an absolute flood of likes from our “mutual” friend. The strange part was the quantity/rapid succession of likes (and these were from comments I left on different writers’ Substacks! Not even my own posts!) I was about to reach out to her to see what the deal was. Glad it’s been handled!
Over the past two weeks I’ve had two different new subscribers sign up. On both occasions, following my subsequent post, they disabled their accounts - yet opened my emails upwards of 700 times. After the first one I thought maybe it was a fluke...but after the second one, I’m going to flag those email addresses and alert Substack about it.
Thank you so much for the post! Hopefully we can rid Substack-land of these scammers before it gets out of hand.
I think Mark at How About This had a similar problem with that, too. It’s a real pain. I have t looked too closely, but is there a “unique reads” option?
Technical note here: Substack will attribute opens of a forwarded email to the original recipient. When a user forwards a post emails to a large list, you would expect to see a large number of 'opens' for that user along with a large number of 'devices' .
Cases with a large number of 'opens' on a very small number of 'devices' are more likely a sign of bot activity (or just a problem with someone's email client).
No official explanation. It wasn't clear to me what virtue there would be in scripting a bunch of likes. Looks like it gets you visibility in popular Substack posts though!?
We are looking at some measures to prevent this in the future.
It's really odd isn't it? At first I couldn't see the angle--other than to use the "power of reciprocity" --meaning, people want to check out who likes their comments--to drive up page views and, though it seems a stretch, maybe subscriptions. It's meant a nice bump in page views for me, but I'm not really chasing traffic so much as long-term engagement and subscriptions. But hey, it doesn't hurt.
Chris - I don’t have a large set of subscribers so it jumped out to me big time. It was case 253386 if you wanted to look at the trail. There were several screen shots attached. It ended up being more than 26,000 opens, I do remember 1 or 0 devices, nothing that I would have noticed. Even after I banned and removed the subscriber the newsletter kept getting marked as opened and messing up my stats. Support guys “fixed” my stats so I don’t really know what happened after that.
My thought on the likes, and I had weird subscriber names ie. [name]@ highestqualityleadsnow.com is that users not familiar with how substack works were trying to harvest emails? I read somewhere emails can fetch $4.00 a piece it seems a user name like “highestqualityleadsnow” would be interested a way to get them.
Over the weekend I started chatting with a few others about it, then did the same of a Facebook group called Substack Writers, and it just poked the bear in me. You're welcome.
I had several weird multiple subscribers lately with this [name]@highestqualityleadsnow.com and [name]@ twistedinkcustom.us . I emailed substack but they told me they had other issues to deal with.
That Cory Doctorow piece was recommended to me by a friend about a month ago and it was like a great gasp of revelation. So THAT'S why everything sucks now!
Great piece, Tom. I'm with you -- I'm not interested in harassing suspected violators either. A big part of me will always appreciate a good hustle, especially one that isn't outright abusive. However, if we and the platform itself can keep Substack from succumbing to enshittification, we should. Part of that is banning bots, which includes real humans behaving like bots.
There's still a human behind every bot, setting their direction, right? I mean, I wrote to "her" and got nothing, but that doesn't mean there wasn't somebody behind the curtain ...
Im a Hannah target too! I’ve been wondering why she was liking all these super old comments I’ve made. But I did t have your journalistic commitment to follow through. So thanks for answering this question for me. Substack’s still social media at the end of the day.
I hope there’s a path by which Substack can avoid the corruption that plagues other social media but it may be impossible given the demand of investors for growth over quality of experience.
Thanks, Tom, for following the thread and shining some light on it. I feel a little protective of it because of how other social media platforms have been “enshittified” by random noise, and dang it, I like it here. I tried to reverse image search her profile pic and just got weird Pinterest posts...strong bot energy for sure.
Me, too. I don't think "she" is alone either. Rather distressing. I don't really want to police likes and comments so much that I have to determ8ne whether participants are real.
Yeah, I had some Hannah likes today, too. On comments I made over a year ago... Didn't take much notice.
Newsflash though -- I followed the link you posted to her Substack, and I can still see it. So either it's unblocked or it's cached somewhere between me and her.
It could be something as un-nefarious as someone experimenting with ChatGPT to see who buys in. I could see me doing that -- not trying to "trick" someone or scam them, but to test the limits of AI. Or maybe it's someone trying to get a quick and dirty way to make subscription money. (I wonder if anyone is paying for this?)
Either way, based on the posts I read, it's not fit for purpose...
Thanks, Tom. BTW, “Hannah Williams,” who likes all my comments but not my posts, is still around. Unless I’m getting a cached copy of “her” site, and I don’t think so. Geez.
“She” was down for an hour or two, and now back up. What happened? Did Substack resolve the violation of terms? I think we have to ask Substack to clarify.
Ha ha, I really did mean that as a joke, but I should not be making such jokes in this context--that is to say, a context where we clearly have in “Hannah Williams” a non-human content generation entity (though one trusts that there is somewhere a human behind it). What I should have said is that I only subscribe to things that I want to read and, respectfullly, I don’t know that I want to read yours yet.
Hey, thank you, that's very kind. I've been here over a year and this is really the first of this type of thing I've seen. The more we can all be sensitized to it and not accepting of it, the better off we are. The Substack thing says all the right things, and one hopes that means they will also act on them.
Lots of good here, for sure
Glad you are back! I wonder how many people the bots (I don't think "hannah williams" is the only bot) have chased away from Substack, and who deployed them.
Well put!
This was so helpful and insightful! Thank you for the mention. I was indeed talking about "Hannah". I didn't want to be wrong, so I didn't mention the name at first. I never subscribed, because to me it felt fishy that ALL the content was locked in a paywall. That is something we should be wary of. People want to first glimpse at what you offer as a writer or artist. They're not going to just blindly pay you not knowing if it's worth their time and money.
Thanks in part to you! Let's hope more people get aware of the sneaky ways these jackals get after us.
It feels good to see HW taken down. Man, you were quick on a hot take! Thanks for the very useful dialogue and suggestions
Thank you. I'm not a hot taker by nature, but this one felt urgent.
You really put this all in the right perspective, Tom. I like that you tried to make contact first, since it was a questionable account, but not 100 percent verifiable. This is one benefit of having a tighter knit community, is that we're all talking, watching out for one another and within what little power we have trying to keep things sane around these parts. Win!
That's it, isn't it Brian? We see something weird, we check with others, and then we act. I want no part of mob rule or chasing witches, but if we see a devil in our midst ...
I like the attempt to contact and engage in dialogue, too. That’s how a healthy community should work!
I saw all those Hannah Williams likes on my posts over the past couple of weeks and thought I was trending. Damn you, Tom, for crashing me back to Earth.
Me too! It was sort of creepy.
We were all getting them!
Super interesting read, Tom. I was also getting suspicious about Hannah given the wide-ranging likes of every comment I'd made everywhere.
Edit: but also, their account still seems to be there. Did it get removed and then reinstated?
Yes, it did get reinstated. I’ve seen no activity there as of yesterday.
Haha! She was after all of us!
I was about to report her today! I couldn’t figure out how she was seeing all of my comments. Thank you for the enlightenment Tom!
Me too - I thought I had a stalker !
Ha! I came here to say the same thing.
Same!
This might be the most timely post I’ve ever read here.
Over the past few days (maybe a week?) I’ve been receiving an absolute flood of likes from our “mutual” friend. The strange part was the quantity/rapid succession of likes (and these were from comments I left on different writers’ Substacks! Not even my own posts!) I was about to reach out to her to see what the deal was. Glad it’s been handled!
Over the past two weeks I’ve had two different new subscribers sign up. On both occasions, following my subsequent post, they disabled their accounts - yet opened my emails upwards of 700 times. After the first one I thought maybe it was a fluke...but after the second one, I’m going to flag those email addresses and alert Substack about it.
Thank you so much for the post! Hopefully we can rid Substack-land of these scammers before it gets out of hand.
I had a user account open an email 24,000 times. I ended up having to ban and remove them. Messed up my stats for weeks!
WOAH! That's alotta times.
I think Mark at How About This had a similar problem with that, too. It’s a real pain. I have t looked too closely, but is there a “unique reads” option?
Technical note here: Substack will attribute opens of a forwarded email to the original recipient. When a user forwards a post emails to a large list, you would expect to see a large number of 'opens' for that user along with a large number of 'devices' .
Cases with a large number of 'opens' on a very small number of 'devices' are more likely a sign of bot activity (or just a problem with someone's email client).
Thanks for jumping in Chris. Do you guys have an official explanation for all the liked comments?
No official explanation. It wasn't clear to me what virtue there would be in scripting a bunch of likes. Looks like it gets you visibility in popular Substack posts though!?
We are looking at some measures to prevent this in the future.
It's really odd isn't it? At first I couldn't see the angle--other than to use the "power of reciprocity" --meaning, people want to check out who likes their comments--to drive up page views and, though it seems a stretch, maybe subscriptions. It's meant a nice bump in page views for me, but I'm not really chasing traffic so much as long-term engagement and subscriptions. But hey, it doesn't hurt.
This is helpful to know. Thanks for sharing.
Chris - I don’t have a large set of subscribers so it jumped out to me big time. It was case 253386 if you wanted to look at the trail. There were several screen shots attached. It ended up being more than 26,000 opens, I do remember 1 or 0 devices, nothing that I would have noticed. Even after I banned and removed the subscriber the newsletter kept getting marked as opened and messing up my stats. Support guys “fixed” my stats so I don’t really know what happened after that.
My thought on the likes, and I had weird subscriber names ie. [name]@ highestqualityleadsnow.com is that users not familiar with how substack works were trying to harvest emails? I read somewhere emails can fetch $4.00 a piece it seems a user name like “highestqualityleadsnow” would be interested a way to get them.
Over the weekend I started chatting with a few others about it, then did the same of a Facebook group called Substack Writers, and it just poked the bear in me. You're welcome.
I like the bear in you, Tom. Whatever percentage he encompasses. :-)
I had several weird multiple subscribers lately with this [name]@highestqualityleadsnow.com and [name]@ twistedinkcustom.us . I emailed substack but they told me they had other issues to deal with.
I haven't seen those; will keep an eye out.
That Cory Doctorow piece was recommended to me by a friend about a month ago and it was like a great gasp of revelation. So THAT'S why everything sucks now!
Great piece, Tom. I'm with you -- I'm not interested in harassing suspected violators either. A big part of me will always appreciate a good hustle, especially one that isn't outright abusive. However, if we and the platform itself can keep Substack from succumbing to enshittification, we should. Part of that is banning bots, which includes real humans behaving like bots.
There's still a human behind every bot, setting their direction, right? I mean, I wrote to "her" and got nothing, but that doesn't mean there wasn't somebody behind the curtain ...
I like that - enshittification. That’s what I’d like to avoid on here too, as the engagement is honest and meaningful.
Yes. We must fight enshittification with deshittification. And a neighborhood watch kinda system for keeping each other informed.
Im a Hannah target too! I’ve been wondering why she was liking all these super old comments I’ve made. But I did t have your journalistic commitment to follow through. So thanks for answering this question for me. Substack’s still social media at the end of the day.
I hope there’s a path by which Substack can avoid the corruption that plagues other social media but it may be impossible given the demand of investors for growth over quality of experience.
Time will tell!
one of us one of us one of us 😃
Thanks, Tom, for following the thread and shining some light on it. I feel a little protective of it because of how other social media platforms have been “enshittified” by random noise, and dang it, I like it here. I tried to reverse image search her profile pic and just got weird Pinterest posts...strong bot energy for sure.
Meg and I did the same with the image search ... total weirdness
Well played, Tom. At some point I will be stealing that photo and making you into a proper pirate. For posterity.
Me, too. I don't think "she" is alone either. Rather distressing. I don't really want to police likes and comments so much that I have to determ8ne whether participants are real.
It would be nice if one platform could figure out how to solve this problem, before Substack goes the way of so many others, wouldn’t it?
Thanks, Tom, for being so, well, skeptical and having such a sensitive "bullshit indicator." And by the way, I do happen to think you're hot. : )
Somebody had to call me on my transparent angling for a modeling gig ...
Yeah, I had some Hannah likes today, too. On comments I made over a year ago... Didn't take much notice.
Newsflash though -- I followed the link you posted to her Substack, and I can still see it. So either it's unblocked or it's cached somewhere between me and her.
It could be something as un-nefarious as someone experimenting with ChatGPT to see who buys in. I could see me doing that -- not trying to "trick" someone or scam them, but to test the limits of AI. Or maybe it's someone trying to get a quick and dirty way to make subscription money. (I wonder if anyone is paying for this?)
Either way, based on the posts I read, it's not fit for purpose...
Graham, can you take some screenshots of the site? It’s disappeared for me …
Way ahead of you -- check your inbox...
Let me know if you'd like to see others.
Wait, hold that ... just checked from my iPad and it’s working. Did they clear up a misunderstanding?
Thanks, Tom. BTW, “Hannah Williams,” who likes all my comments but not my posts, is still around. Unless I’m getting a cached copy of “her” site, and I don’t think so. Geez.
“She” was down for an hour or two, and now back up. What happened? Did Substack resolve the violation of terms? I think we have to ask Substack to clarify.
Oddly, I cannot like your post. But I like it. Guarantee I'm a real person. Trade subscriptions?
Hmm, that’s strange. I would be remiss if I didn’t say to your request to trade: “Let me first see if I think you’re real first.”
Helpfully, I have a post which addresses that. https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/isha-yiras-hashem-are-you-for-real
Ha ha, I really did mean that as a joke, but I should not be making such jokes in this context--that is to say, a context where we clearly have in “Hannah Williams” a non-human content generation entity (though one trusts that there is somewhere a human behind it). What I should have said is that I only subscribe to things that I want to read and, respectfullly, I don’t know that I want to read yours yet.
Check out my latest post about Zimbabwe, and my top post about Living Forever!
I am not sure why it took me to innovate trading subscriptions. You would think it's an easy way to build community