It Absolutely Is Personal

Non-fiction

It Absolutely Is Something Personal

     When Substack first introduced Notes, I was initially dead-set against the whole idea of bringing a social media implementation to the platform. This was supposed to be a place for writers to put together entertaining or thought-provoking pieces for the readership of the service to enjoy, and I just couldn’t see how Twitter-fying the thing could possibly be helpful, given how the limited character restrictions of the Blue Bird of ScreamoSpace and Tik Tok, its video equivalent, seemed to be decimating people’s attention spans in the literal sense (carving away ten percent of a person’s attention span at a time, it seemed to me). The sort of works I’ve personally come to deeply enjoy on Substack, the Stacks that get and keep my attention more than anything else, tend to be the medium-to-long ones, and I had rather foolishly assumed that was the normal perspective among users of the service.

     Then Notes came along and, well, I flinched. I wrote an entire Post about how I intended to perhaps dip my toe a little in it, and nothing more. Eventually, I got roped in just like everybody else around me.

     Part of the reason, early on, was simple- Notes didn’t appear to be quickly devolving into the kind of flame war howling fits that dominate Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, the other socials/message boards that I had previously felt the need to largely abandon due to lack of thoughtful dialogue or creative presentations. I was quite pleased with most of the discourse on Notes, even in instances where I tended to find myself in disagreement with the folks whose feeds were being served up to me via some unknown algorithmic suggestion metric.

     Of late, that has shifted once again, and as happened before on those other platforms, Notes seems to be taking a turn for the worse in many ways from my vantage. I have to stress that, by the way; these are all just personal observations, my dear reader. Do not take them as holy writ or guaranteed and demonstrable beyond the shadow of a doubt.

     Early on and until about October of last year, I had been on Substack for just over 3 years, and had only found myself needing to block or mute two people, total, due to their nastiness and spam-happy activity on my posts. It was a pretty good run. But then, in December of 2023, I wrote a lengthy piece regarding the whole “Substackers Against Nazis” situation, and ended up getting deluged with a whole host of horseshit that I had previously assumed (erroneously so, it turns out) was simply not the norm here on Substack.

     I can’t say I was completely surprised, though. Make a comment or speak your mind on any socio-political topic in ANY online space, and prepare for impact. I don’t want to reside in any kind of echo chamber or silo, but holy good God, the sheer level of invective dribbling out of people’s mouths on here when you step one toe into the realm of the political conversations is mind-boggling!

     Now, why am I so flabbergasted by this? After all, I’ve been moderately to heavily online since about 2007, when I started using YouTube a lot. I’ve seen the primary online gathering spaces go through the usual cycles about a dozen times, at least. Yet, with Substack, I was taken off guard by the vitriol, both in the form of Notes and in the form of regular Posts. How did I not see it coming? After all, when Notes was introduced, this sort of contentiousness was precisely what I was worried about popping up; when did I let my guard down?

     ‘Tell the truth and shame the Devil’, as the old axiom goes. I let my guard down when I started getting recommendations from Notes’s algorithm that served me up Notes and links to fellow genre fiction storytellers. I have ended up tacking on a lot of my subscriptions and follows based on the recommendations of Substack’s Notes feed, and have indulged in a healthy dose of indie fantasy, sci-fi and horror, as well as some fabulous articles and essays about mythology, folklore, and the techniques of the art of narrative thanks to these recommendations. It’s been excellent!

     Sadly, those aren’t the only writers whom the algorithm started serving up in the hopes of getting me to look into more folks’ works on the platform. Political commentators from both sides of the socio-political aisle started popping up, and more frequently, and soon enough, the only suggestions that were put into my feed that I wasn’t already following or subscribed to were howling fringe left weirdos with a near-terminal case of TDS, and right-side MAGA die-hards who think Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ with a really easily mocked hairdo.

     On both sides, I ended up doing a lot of ‘Muting’, which is Substack’s polite way of ensuring users don’t have to see what those users are posting unless they want to directly search them out and read through their Notes or Posts. It’s not as far as a Block, which cuts that user off from seeing anything you yourself post up or commenting on your material, and offers a kind of buffer barrier that at least keeps users from wanting to tear their hair out every time they log onto the service to see what’s new that day.

     Substack’s algorithm effectively lured me in with what I liked, what I enjoyed, and what I myself produced, which is genre fiction and chatter around the realm of narrative. Once it had me committed, it started trying to feed me exactly what I didn’t want, which is the socio-political. To be fair, I’ve brought a lot of that on my own head since December of last year, and in a few brief windows previously when I have myself commented on current events. But there’s a reason that those pieces are the rarest sorts one will find on my Stack.

     Since joining in on the lovely weekly fiction events that have been largely organized and run by The Brothers Krynn, Brian Reindel, and a few others on the platform, I’ve been keeping relatively quiet in other areas. Sure, I sprog out the occasional Perspective piece in the meanwhile, but by and large, I have been trying to minimize my usage of Notes and of Substack generally speaking except to read from my subscriptions and follows. I am doing this in order to try avoiding getting sucked into the kind of flame war nonsense I ultimately allowed myself to fall into on those other services.

     I came to Substack to tell stories and put out some more thoughtful non-fiction scribbling, not to do what made me miserable on those other platforms.

     I wish that I could say that this distancing isn’t personal, but it absolutely is. It isn’t everybody’s fault who I run across on Notes, but frankly, a lot of you folks who are indulging in culture war topics and politics are so entrenched in your positions and so virulently hateful of anyone disagreeing with you that I cannot invest more time there than I do. I tend to lean right myself these days, and when I see the pure malice folks from the left lob across the digital field, I feel overwhelmed with the urge to find some dark god to ransom my soul to for the ability to reach through the internet and choke the ever-loving life out of them for both their arrogance, and their ignorance. The socio-political right aren’t perfect, far from it, but at least they have the integrity to by and large confess to not being perfect; you twats on the left are so certain of your moral superiority that you’d happily watch the rest of the world burn if it meant you could silence your ideological opponents.

     Add into this mix the fact that there seems to be a whole mess of in-fighting on both sides of the political aisle, and I realize that this withdrawal is not only likely a good idea for my own well-being, it might be advisable for some of you folks out there too. I’ve proven prone to falling into the death spiral these sorts of things develop into too many times to not finally learn my lesson and just back away for a bit.

     So, in summation, if you feel the need to know where I stand on issues X, Y or Z, by all means, go ahead and ask. Be warned, I might not answer the question, but let’s be honest here with one another- since when did people come to me for that sort of thing? If you need me, I’ll be over here being Dad and working on genre fiction stories.

     God bless.