It’s hard to believe I started writing this newsletter in 2021.
Time really does fly.
First things first. To all the OG’s who are still here from the early days: I appreciate the hell out of you.
I couldn’t do this without your support.
To the new subscribers: you guys are cool too. I hope you like it here and that you stick around for the long haul.
The world has changed a lot in the past few years, but the one constant is that I never stopped writing. This is what I’ve learned.
Does anonymity make it easier to write what you want?
Yes and no.
Being anonymous means that the risk to your personal reputation is gone.
You don’t have to worry about people coming after you IRL because of something you wrote…
But to be honest I think Personal Reputation Risk is overstated as a cause of self-censorship.
In my case, I don’t have a boss and I’m not dependent on anyone for my income; so if a social media mob came after me it wouldn’t have any real effect on my life.
Of course, many writers have day jobs so it’s a bigger concern, but I still don’t think it’s the real reason people censor themselves.
IMO, the biggest cause of self-censorship among writers is Audience Capture.
The problem with being a writer in the Information Age is that you have too much information. You can see the metrics on the dashboard in real time. You see what people engage with. You see what gets the most likes. You see what types of articles generate the most paying subscribers.
Even if you tell yourself “I’m not going to pay attention to that crap”…you do.
It’s impossible not to.
It’s VERY hard not to tailor your writing to what you know will increase these metrics. And the really hard part is that it can happen subconsciously. You start writing something and you intuitively know it’s not going to get much engagement so you abandon it and start writing something that will.
The problem is that bending the knee to the metrics only gets results in the short run.
The reason why any writer attracts readers in the first place is because they’re saying something fresh and “authentic” (hate that word due to overuse but it applies here).
The initial DGAF vibe is refreshing and real. People can’t get enough of it. And it’s easy to not give a shit when you have a small audience (or none at all).
Then as your audience grows and you genuinely have something to lose, the pressure to write what you think people want to hear instead of what you really want to say grows and grows.
And, counterintuitively, the second you stop writing what you want is the moment the death spiral begins.
So that’s why I think the benefits of being an anonymous writer are a bit overstated vis-a-vis the ability to be free to say what you want.
The pressure to conform is always there and you always have to consciously fight against it.
I think I’ve done a good job of resisting it so far, but it’s not because I’m anonymous.
It’s personality-based. You either have the ability to resist or you don’t.
Algorithms are a bitch
The benefit of Substack is that you aren’t a slave to the algo.
This newsletter goes out to real people, and once someone subscribes they see everything I put out.
That doesn’t apply on X app.
People call it the ‘free speech platform.’ That’s complete BS. It’s true that no human will directly censor you. But that doesn’t free you from the tentacles of the invisible god known as the algorithm.
Being censored by a human - although obviously unpleasant - is at least understandable. There’s usually some degree of malice there. Something you said pissed them off, so they suppressed you. Hatred is one of the base level primal emotions that everyone can understand.
But when it’s an algorithm that censors you there’s nothing to wrap your head around. It just sucks. You get the same feeling as the characters in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, who are being perpetually tortured by an AI and have no idea why (great short story btw).
