Censorship at Substack?
And a special Christmas present…
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and I really don’t want to talk about this topic, because it certainly isn’t very Christmasy. So I will be brief.
Based on evidence a number of Substack writers are accumulating, there may be some soft censorship going on here at Substack.
Many of us were enjoying steady, robust growth, and then all of a sudden, we plateaued.
Subscription rates dropped by 90 percent.
Reach in Notes plummeted.
Paid subs leveled off or went negative.
Stackers with subscriber bases of all sizes have reported having growth charts that look like this:
Everything was going swimmingly, and then wham—like a door closing, it all went horizontal. And for many of us, it started around the same time, or at least within a comparatively small time window. Coincidence?
I used to get many times the reach in Notes that I do now. Many others are reporting the same. Notes had become a major source of new subs for us. Now, it is like we’ve been ghettoized into some corner where few new people ever see us.
That could just be a change in how the Notes algorithm works, without any specific malintent. But it is interesting that numerous disgraced rejects from mainstream media have rolled in here, set up camp, and are now thriving.
It’s not paranoia if it’s actually happening.
Needless to say, there could be explanations other than malicious intent. However, it does somewhat strain credulity to suggest that scores of Substacks whose content didn’t change all suddenly cratered in appeal almost overnight.
More than one Substack employee has reacted to these concerns as if we are paranoid. That reaction is both insulting and illogical.
Gee, I cannot imagine why we might be wary after more than a decade of obvious censorship by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Alexa, every major search engine, and a host of other platforms and services.
The censorship on those platforms is not a matter of conspiracy theory; it is established fact. Is it such a stretch to imagine it happening here?
Could Substack be receiving pressure from outside forces? From their venture capital backers? It’s not too wild a notion, given what has happened worldwide, to increasing degrees since at least 2014.
An algorithmic plateau mechanism?
There is more going on than just a decline in new subs and reach in Notes. Subscribers are being unsubscribed from Stacks without their knowledge or any action on their part. It just happens—almost as if it were automated.
Some have had to resubscribe to their favorite Stacks multiple times. These include friends, family, and close acquaintances with whom the Stacker can directly check to confirm.
Some Stackers are reporting massive discrepancies between drops in their subscriber counts and the number of unsubscribe/email disable notifications they receive. Their subscriber numbers will drop by 10 times the number of notifications.
Some have reported that any increase in subscriptions is matched by an increase in the rate of unsubscribes/email disables. Almost as if there were some algorithm that is designed to keep your total numbers right around where they were when the algorithm was switched on.
I recently had a spike in new subscribers (as a result of a Sydney Sweeney post, LOL), which allowed me to test this hypothesis. Did the rate of unsubscribes/email disables increase right after that jump in subscribers?
I fed some data into ChatGPT, and the results were suggestive, though not conclusive. Using these data, ChatGPT found “evidence consistent with an adaptive or throttling mechanism … an algorithm [that] dynamically increases removals in response to additions, in order to keep the cumulative total roughly constant.” The data, ChatGPT suggested, point to the notion that “This is not random churn behavior.”
That is not dispositive, though it is suggestive. And it all bears further investigation.
I plan to start contacting people who unsubscribed to see if they really did choose to do so, or if it happened without their knowledge. That too will be quite telling.
This is doing real damage.
If things had continued as they had been going, both my paid and free subscribers would have doubled by now. I see no reason why my rate of growth should have changed so drastically. My content was sufficiently appealing that I grew from ~600 to ~3,800 in a single year.
Substack did not run out of users. Something is fishy.
Like I said at the beginning, this is not a fun topic, and Christmas should be fun, so I will just say one final thing, and make you an offer…
A Two-Way Christmas Present
One of the consequences of all of this is that Stackers are losing paid subscribers as well as free. For some of us, this is needed income, which means that if there are shenanigans going on, we are being robbed of our livelihoods by malicious actors.
That is evil, and we are all about defying evil here at the Freedom Scale, and in the freedom movement in general. So I have a proposal and offer to make.
From now through Christmas, I will make a year’s subscription just one dollar. After Stripe and Substack take their cut, that is just pennies for me, but it’s not about the money right now. Somehow, Substack or Stripe—or some malicious actors within either organization—appear to be robbing us of paid subs. I want to fight back against that.
So my Christmas present to you is my paid content, and all of my archives, for a year for just $1. It’s normally $50, so that’s a 98% discount!
And by getting your paid sub at that price, your Christmas present to me is to help me defy this censorship—this slow bleed of subscribers by 1,000 algorithmic cuts. Let’s make it harder for them!
I can’t make it totally free, because then only the comp number will go up, not the real number of paid subs. And that number matters as much as the dollars.
But if I could make it free, I would, because it’s not about the money—it’s about making a statement. (And $1 is basically free anyway :-)
I have done my best to keep most of my new content free, but your support still matters…now more than ever.
So here’s that link:
I went from slow but steady growth until Dec 2024. I have gained less than net 50subs all 2025. Lost probably 300-400. My average reads of posts dropped about 35%
Maybe some censorship, but I see three things: Trump won, the feeling of existential dread on the right dropped; i changed much of the focus of my substack from politics to the esoteric spiritual so a lot of people were, Meh; a lot of people on the right have soured on substack because it is clear, substack admin means to be the clearinghouse for all things shitlib tds slop, does at best nothing for dissident right writers, and has downplayed long-form writing in favor of scroll addiction.
I noticed the drop off when the internet censorship bills overseas began being discussed or suggested. It ramped up after that. @Runeknight3 and I are looking into self-publishing and removing anything resembling restraint on a movie rating. Think of what's coming as the brutal Director's Cut. Unrated.