This is a very measured analysis of a problem that tends to be ignored. I think a key issue is that platform algorithms tend to incentivise the wrong type of behaviours - chief amongst those is the commodification of validation. This changes how many people write by turning everything into an advertisement. That is evidently open to automated exploitation.
Thanks Michael. The good news is that Substack seems to have snuffed out this particular issue … either that or it just didn’t make any money and the scammer tried another approach. But I think we all need to stay aware of potential manipulation, especially if we’re going to keep this neighborhood a decent place.
Thanks for the helpful article Tom. I wasn't aware of the email tos@substack.com before your post, and am I pretty mystified by anything that happens beyond the point of reporting someone on Substack. My particular area of interest is in reporting hate speech, it is extremely ineffective on Substack.
Any advice you could offer would be very much appreciated! 🙏
Yeah, the TOS alias seems to be the one, as I and others have found. BUT, I do notice that Substack personnel seem to monitor and reply to questions and complains on the weekly Office Hours channel, if you know what I'm talking about. Drop me an email at tompendergast@gmail.com if you don't know what I mean.
I've been around since Day One of the Internet, I've seen them come, and I've seen them go.
It is painful to consider all those keystrokes, but none of them are wasted: think of it like chat at the pub with your pals, then you all decide to go to a better pub.
Yeah, I guess I have too now that you mention it. And my buddies and I have been moving from pub to pub in town: one gets too popular and too loud and we go find another.
if she EVER goes public with the naughty email i once sent her (and even james joyce's nora would have blushed) i am sooooooooo hmmmmm not fucked really but compromised lol
knew she was a bot didnt matter is heather havrilesky taking new patients?
btw i liked her first black and white photo the best just kept believing the boats in background were in haifa and maybe we'd picnic there on first date lmfao
I’ve also been “substalked” as I call it. For a while, this one user account would go through and like every single comment I made during office hours.for weeks. So I finally blocked them. They’re still the only account here I’ve had to block. I don’t care how many times a user likes my comments, that is not going to make me sub. Damn good writing does. Conversations do. Real humans I can engage with do.
Hannah is still going strong. I received a mail from "her" appended to one of my subscriber posts that supposedly only my subscribers could have access to. She had been following me around various substacks I subscribe to, "liking" my comments. It felt a little like stalking and I took my newsletter private at which point all the likes ceased. However there are a few interesting things that you might make sense of. The post she appended her letter to me on was one I sent out on March 31. On that same day my subscriber count went up by one and then the next day was back to its regular count. I never received from Substack either a subscribe or unsubscribe notice for that blip. The letter I got from her today is to me but the salutation is to a Katie Hawkins-Gaar, another substack writer. It looks like a mass mailing and they forgot to delete Katie's name and substitute mine. The letter itself proposes a mutual aid relationship but some of the language is unusual: "channel" substitutes for newsletter and there is one sentence that looks like the writer was unfamiliar with English. So, she is still active, and as long as she and others like her are roaming Substack I'm keeping my newsletter in private mode
Isn’t that fascinating? I’ve been blocked from subscribing to “her” account, so I don’t really see the continuation of “her” initial efforts to build up a subscriber count. If your account is private I don’t suspect I can email you directly. Could I ask you to drop me an email at tompendergast@gmail.com? I’d love to understand more before I comment further.
1) Where is a Substacker's e-mail address listed? 2) Before "Hannah" blocked you, did you read her book reviews to see if they seem to be produced by artificial intelligence?
Every Substack is assigned the email based on their Substack URL, so https://tompendergast.substack.com becomes tompendergast@substack.com. You may have to use the web version and not the app to find the URL. As for reading the posts, I read several of them and I found them to bear signs of being “generated,” but this is not definitive. I think we’re going to be getting into a weird zone where we just won’t be able to know what is written by humans or by machines. What I can tell you is, I don’t find the reviews on that site very good.
This is what I got today. Addressed to me, but salutation to someone else:
Good day, Katie Hawkins-Gaar!
My name is Hannah, and I write "The Collection", a channel on Substack that has, to my surprise, quickly reached proud results. I write about various topics, main ones being self-development, business, negotiation, psychology, marketing, and success stories.
I honestly believe that my audience will find your channel interesting. Therefore, I propose that we mutually recommend each other on Substack for the mutual growth and benefit of our channels. If you have any thoughts or questions, I'm open to discussion and look forward to your reply. I wish you all the best and hope you have a great day!
With love,
Hannah
***
"... quickly reached proud results" [??] that sounds Chatbot generated.
Tom, I never charge, nor have any desire to even have hundreds of subscribers. I write for myself and lots of my stuff is poorly proofread and hastily dashed off..but I have enjoyed it up to now. There is an epistemic tidal wave coming
It will break upon us with the Gen 5 Chatbots I imagine. Seems unstoppable.
This is the behavior that I associate with “content mills,” operations which attempt to churn out content without regard to quality and pursue whatever means they can to drive up their views and subscription count. The first method (auto liking comments) was machine-generated (in my opinion), and this one likely is too, but it probably fits within the terms of service. What I hope is that people like you and me, who want to write our stuff and experience the joy of an engaged community of readers, will reject such attempts to game the system and prevent Substack from going down the path of other platforms. There’s a biological metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m not getting it yet ... still on the first cup of coffee.
Recently, I saw that "Hannah," who writes "The Collection," posted a lot of positive replies on a Substack site. I gave her a like, although I was suspicious because she also responded positively to a troll. She was again posting lots of replies on the 5-3 Substack News site. I tried to give her a like and discovered that she had blocked me! I realized -- oh, yeah, HANNAH - - that she had changed her moniker. Notice in my earlier reply to you that I had stated her side. Yet still she blocked me! I had learned of your post here after she had creepily liked all my little comments on different Substacks. We have a stalker with three Substacks, who blocks people who question her odd activity.
The site is back, but without activity as far as I can tell. It was down very briefly for a TOS violation, but it appears all the likes have been purged.
That's good. If it's a bot they best remove the whole substack, though. I am new on here (4 weeks) so still learning the ins and outs, but me no like bots!
Great piece, as always. Thanks for this. Though is it wrong I feel a bit jilted that HW didn't try to buy a Bus ticket? Oh, well.
Seriously, though - I've really enjoyed using Substack for the last year and feel like I've got a sense of control in a communal environment I wouldn't have on another platform. I've never been a Twitter user (have an account but have only used it when my kids' school teams were posting) and though I have a personal and The Bus Instagram account, the latter is coming to a close because I can't be bothered to do all the fucking hashtags required for each issue. Plus, in a year I've NEVER converted one Instagram 'liker' to a Bus Rider, so .... But it takes vigilance to keep things in control and the pirates at bay. Keep up the fight - and know I'm not only happy to load and light the cannon next to yours, but have a dagger in my sash in case they get aboard. As, of course, I shout 'Hey you guys!' and abseil down the mainsail.
Oh, and it's not only nice to know we've both used Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, but it's great to know I'm not the only middle aged man getting catcalled on construction sites!
Oh man, we're clones when it comes to Twitter and Instagram (and construction sites, apparently). I'm glad you chuckled at my joke--at least someone other than me did!
Of course not. I'm saying on slender evidence that you have all maligned Hannah Williams. I don't know what is meant by "cyber-stalking" in this case. You're all hurling serious accusations against a person new to Substack, possibly anxious and with, let's say, OCD. Tom and I have agreed to continue to discuss this privately. I will say this: one of Tom's areas of expertise is cybersecurity. And I learned in recovery that "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." I am out of this conversation.
This "Wayne Robins" seems like a chat bot; did you see how "Robins" changed his tone dramatically from its nice, sweet first post, like a bot with just 2 settings? "Robins" is trying to obfuscate the FACT that the harm the H.W. bot caused is real, WRITERS LEFT SUBSTACK OVER IT! I almost left myself, faced with 3 stalkers (4? 2 accounts seemed to be the same bot/person, and they all follow Ted Levi Toldman, curiously). For all we know the comments of "robins" are DISINFORMATION: that "hannah williams" is a real person, a mother in N. Carolina, bla bla... Russian bots? Twitter bots? Who deployed Hannah Williams et al. and for what purpose?
Thanks; I’m glad you found me (and that Kate led you here). Your question about the purpose and the relation to the recommendation engine is a good one. First, I’ll say that I’ve not tried to dig into the logic of the recommendation engine so that I can answer this with great confidence. But my assumption, based on the number of users (both writers and readers), is that they have to use some kind of algorithm to surface stuff for people and that algorithm works off both “direct” recommendations (people who recommend others) and “implicit” recommendations (popular posts, those with lots of likes and comments and commented like). My take would be that the comment scam is designed to increase discoverability and encourage those who have been commented on to subscribe or at least review the site. If Substack is like the other platforms that use recommendations, they’ll hold this algorithm close to their chest so that people can’t game it. Interesting question.
Gah! Such an interesting article Tom. Found you via The Matterhorn substack. This fills me with dread and I just hope the Substack team are on this with protecting their coding. Like you I have never had such a great community experience. It feels special and I hope it can stay this way. Interested to read that you think likes contribute to the recommends engine. That would be some sort of algorithm thing? I thought / hoped substack wasn’t doing that because it prioritises those with huge followings. Which I’m AGAINST.
Maybe you would pursue this story further. This person also has a Hannah Doan (aka Grace) Williams Substack: Book Nerd Native. She also has a Book Nerd Native Instagram account with 82.6K followers. She is a parent in North Carolina. She posts a photograph of herself. Read her posts to see if she sounds like artificial intelligence.
This is a very measured analysis of a problem that tends to be ignored. I think a key issue is that platform algorithms tend to incentivise the wrong type of behaviours - chief amongst those is the commodification of validation. This changes how many people write by turning everything into an advertisement. That is evidently open to automated exploitation.
Thanks Michael. The good news is that Substack seems to have snuffed out this particular issue … either that or it just didn’t make any money and the scammer tried another approach. But I think we all need to stay aware of potential manipulation, especially if we’re going to keep this neighborhood a decent place.
Thanks for the helpful article Tom. I wasn't aware of the email tos@substack.com before your post, and am I pretty mystified by anything that happens beyond the point of reporting someone on Substack. My particular area of interest is in reporting hate speech, it is extremely ineffective on Substack.
Any advice you could offer would be very much appreciated! 🙏
Yeah, the TOS alias seems to be the one, as I and others have found. BUT, I do notice that Substack personnel seem to monitor and reply to questions and complains on the weekly Office Hours channel, if you know what I'm talking about. Drop me an email at tompendergast@gmail.com if you don't know what I mean.
Thanks again, great idea!
https://youtu.be/yY-JlEfoo9c
I've been around since Day One of the Internet, I've seen them come, and I've seen them go.
It is painful to consider all those keystrokes, but none of them are wasted: think of it like chat at the pub with your pals, then you all decide to go to a better pub.
Yeah, I guess I have too now that you mention it. And my buddies and I have been moving from pub to pub in town: one gets too popular and too loud and we go find another.
if she EVER goes public with the naughty email i once sent her (and even james joyce's nora would have blushed) i am sooooooooo hmmmmm not fucked really but compromised lol
knew she was a bot didnt matter is heather havrilesky taking new patients?
It’s amazing anyone falls for any of it!
btw i liked her first black and white photo the best just kept believing the boats in background were in haifa and maybe we'd picnic there on first date lmfao
she changed up her picture several times … but today she’s gone again, delisted by Substack. More attempts to hijack the API? Don’t know.
i wont get involved unless i find out she has also been screwing with heads of my Celtics!😊👹☠️
exactly its not like im a trump voter or sumthin' haha
I’ve also been “substalked” as I call it. For a while, this one user account would go through and like every single comment I made during office hours.for weeks. So I finally blocked them. They’re still the only account here I’ve had to block. I don’t care how many times a user likes my comments, that is not going to make me sub. Damn good writing does. Conversations do. Real humans I can engage with do.
Yeah, isn’t it weird? It’s not Libor Soural is it? He’s gotten a little notoriety over this.
No it was a guy whose substack focused on accounting 😆
Hannah is still going strong. I received a mail from "her" appended to one of my subscriber posts that supposedly only my subscribers could have access to. She had been following me around various substacks I subscribe to, "liking" my comments. It felt a little like stalking and I took my newsletter private at which point all the likes ceased. However there are a few interesting things that you might make sense of. The post she appended her letter to me on was one I sent out on March 31. On that same day my subscriber count went up by one and then the next day was back to its regular count. I never received from Substack either a subscribe or unsubscribe notice for that blip. The letter I got from her today is to me but the salutation is to a Katie Hawkins-Gaar, another substack writer. It looks like a mass mailing and they forgot to delete Katie's name and substitute mine. The letter itself proposes a mutual aid relationship but some of the language is unusual: "channel" substitutes for newsletter and there is one sentence that looks like the writer was unfamiliar with English. So, she is still active, and as long as she and others like her are roaming Substack I'm keeping my newsletter in private mode
Isn’t that fascinating? I’ve been blocked from subscribing to “her” account, so I don’t really see the continuation of “her” initial efforts to build up a subscriber count. If your account is private I don’t suspect I can email you directly. Could I ask you to drop me an email at tompendergast@gmail.com? I’d love to understand more before I comment further.
1) Where is a Substacker's e-mail address listed? 2) Before "Hannah" blocked you, did you read her book reviews to see if they seem to be produced by artificial intelligence?
Every Substack is assigned the email based on their Substack URL, so https://tompendergast.substack.com becomes tompendergast@substack.com. You may have to use the web version and not the app to find the URL. As for reading the posts, I read several of them and I found them to bear signs of being “generated,” but this is not definitive. I think we’re going to be getting into a weird zone where we just won’t be able to know what is written by humans or by machines. What I can tell you is, I don’t find the reviews on that site very good.
This is what I got today. Addressed to me, but salutation to someone else:
Good day, Katie Hawkins-Gaar!
My name is Hannah, and I write "The Collection", a channel on Substack that has, to my surprise, quickly reached proud results. I write about various topics, main ones being self-development, business, negotiation, psychology, marketing, and success stories.
I honestly believe that my audience will find your channel interesting. Therefore, I propose that we mutually recommend each other on Substack for the mutual growth and benefit of our channels. If you have any thoughts or questions, I'm open to discussion and look forward to your reply. I wish you all the best and hope you have a great day!
With love,
Hannah
***
"... quickly reached proud results" [??] that sounds Chatbot generated.
Tom, I never charge, nor have any desire to even have hundreds of subscribers. I write for myself and lots of my stuff is poorly proofread and hastily dashed off..but I have enjoyed it up to now. There is an epistemic tidal wave coming
It will break upon us with the Gen 5 Chatbots I imagine. Seems unstoppable.
you ever hear her podcast voice like an israeli siren couldn't watch gal gadot movies for a month
This is the behavior that I associate with “content mills,” operations which attempt to churn out content without regard to quality and pursue whatever means they can to drive up their views and subscription count. The first method (auto liking comments) was machine-generated (in my opinion), and this one likely is too, but it probably fits within the terms of service. What I hope is that people like you and me, who want to write our stuff and experience the joy of an engaged community of readers, will reject such attempts to game the system and prevent Substack from going down the path of other platforms. There’s a biological metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m not getting it yet ... still on the first cup of coffee.
Recently, I saw that "Hannah," who writes "The Collection," posted a lot of positive replies on a Substack site. I gave her a like, although I was suspicious because she also responded positively to a troll. She was again posting lots of replies on the 5-3 Substack News site. I tried to give her a like and discovered that she had blocked me! I realized -- oh, yeah, HANNAH - - that she had changed her moniker. Notice in my earlier reply to you that I had stated her side. Yet still she blocked me! I had learned of your post here after she had creepily liked all my little comments on different Substacks. We have a stalker with three Substacks, who blocks people who question her odd activity.
Oh yeah, if you question anything related to that site, you’re blocked. Their schema requires gullibility.
Hannah is back. I guess Substack must have looked into it and decided Hannah is Hannah... Meanwhile, I am "Hannah" free! For now.
The site is back, but without activity as far as I can tell. It was down very briefly for a TOS violation, but it appears all the likes have been purged.
That's good. If it's a bot they best remove the whole substack, though. I am new on here (4 weeks) so still learning the ins and outs, but me no like bots!
Yeah, this is the first I’ve seen of it and it was addressed fairly quickly (within a week)
Great piece, as always. Thanks for this. Though is it wrong I feel a bit jilted that HW didn't try to buy a Bus ticket? Oh, well.
Seriously, though - I've really enjoyed using Substack for the last year and feel like I've got a sense of control in a communal environment I wouldn't have on another platform. I've never been a Twitter user (have an account but have only used it when my kids' school teams were posting) and though I have a personal and The Bus Instagram account, the latter is coming to a close because I can't be bothered to do all the fucking hashtags required for each issue. Plus, in a year I've NEVER converted one Instagram 'liker' to a Bus Rider, so .... But it takes vigilance to keep things in control and the pirates at bay. Keep up the fight - and know I'm not only happy to load and light the cannon next to yours, but have a dagger in my sash in case they get aboard. As, of course, I shout 'Hey you guys!' and abseil down the mainsail.
Oh, and it's not only nice to know we've both used Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, but it's great to know I'm not the only middle aged man getting catcalled on construction sites!
Oh man, we're clones when it comes to Twitter and Instagram (and construction sites, apparently). I'm glad you chuckled at my joke--at least someone other than me did!
Damn straight.
Nice post :)
Of course not. I'm saying on slender evidence that you have all maligned Hannah Williams. I don't know what is meant by "cyber-stalking" in this case. You're all hurling serious accusations against a person new to Substack, possibly anxious and with, let's say, OCD. Tom and I have agreed to continue to discuss this privately. I will say this: one of Tom's areas of expertise is cybersecurity. And I learned in recovery that "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." I am out of this conversation.
This "Wayne Robins" seems like a chat bot; did you see how "Robins" changed his tone dramatically from its nice, sweet first post, like a bot with just 2 settings? "Robins" is trying to obfuscate the FACT that the harm the H.W. bot caused is real, WRITERS LEFT SUBSTACK OVER IT! I almost left myself, faced with 3 stalkers (4? 2 accounts seemed to be the same bot/person, and they all follow Ted Levi Toldman, curiously). For all we know the comments of "robins" are DISINFORMATION: that "hannah williams" is a real person, a mother in N. Carolina, bla bla... Russian bots? Twitter bots? Who deployed Hannah Williams et al. and for what purpose?
I don’t think so. I communicated with him directly over email and you can go read his Substack, which to my eyes isn’t the product of generative AI.
Thanks; I’m glad you found me (and that Kate led you here). Your question about the purpose and the relation to the recommendation engine is a good one. First, I’ll say that I’ve not tried to dig into the logic of the recommendation engine so that I can answer this with great confidence. But my assumption, based on the number of users (both writers and readers), is that they have to use some kind of algorithm to surface stuff for people and that algorithm works off both “direct” recommendations (people who recommend others) and “implicit” recommendations (popular posts, those with lots of likes and comments and commented like). My take would be that the comment scam is designed to increase discoverability and encourage those who have been commented on to subscribe or at least review the site. If Substack is like the other platforms that use recommendations, they’ll hold this algorithm close to their chest so that people can’t game it. Interesting question.
Gah! Such an interesting article Tom. Found you via The Matterhorn substack. This fills me with dread and I just hope the Substack team are on this with protecting their coding. Like you I have never had such a great community experience. It feels special and I hope it can stay this way. Interested to read that you think likes contribute to the recommends engine. That would be some sort of algorithm thing? I thought / hoped substack wasn’t doing that because it prioritises those with huge followings. Which I’m AGAINST.
Maybe you would pursue this story further. This person also has a Hannah Doan (aka Grace) Williams Substack: Book Nerd Native. She also has a Book Nerd Native Instagram account with 82.6K followers. She is a parent in North Carolina. She posts a photograph of herself. Read her posts to see if she sounds like artificial intelligence.
That’s very interesting--while I did a little searching, I didn’t find these accounts. I’ll look into it, and thank you.
Looks like a totally different person to me.
AI can actually generate photos of "people" that don't exist.
We've all been Hannah'ed...that profile pic is definitely AI art.
Got it, Tom. So am I. I'm trying to bring down the temperature too. Writing you a personal email right now, and we'' be in touch.
Our emails will cross. I’m just going to try to act in good faith and do the best I can.