I Was No. 1 on Substack—Then This Happened

Feat. Pigs of Substack

Brothers, things are about to get heated! In this groundbreaking article, I explain how SS Substack, the American monopoly on "writing," works. A MUST-READ FOR ALL AUTHORS! Take a deep breath!

INSTEAD of outright deleting accounts—which would be a shot to the foot, since AI management wants to keep the email lists and bank details and spam the tiller out of people—they threw us into a digital gulag! Our subscribers were capped at 3,000 (down from a potential 4 million), with Chinese and Indian readers purged entirely.

Substack is a pyramid-Ponzi scheme. It’s oligarchic (rule by the few), static, entirely inflexible, and designed to funnel millions of readers to a select few channels (→founding generation).

New authors are lured in the Ponzi scheme with promises of unbelievable access to millions of existing readers, but the reality is controls, restrictions, and cell life—unless you recruit new followers to the scheme: Each generation of authors pays a “commission” in form of views and likes to the previous generations (all redistributed by automatons and algorithms), thus keep fewer and fewer views from their followers to themselves, until they’re invisible to everyone on the platform entirely.

RELATED They erased the Substack. We have to start over. Effing tyrants!

For those poor authors who arrived late to Substack, the only way to get some views is by recruiting their family members, aunties and uncles, and former girlfriends. And if someone dares to expose the Ponzi scheme?

Well, I’d like to compare it to a rigged casino, where the gambling mafia watches every new arrival. If a rare talent defies the racket and wins big, he’s either kicked off their turf or robbed of his win and made to see the dentist. At no instance will he be invited to join the mafia family.

Similarly, if you arrive at the Substack party late but your content shines and attracts hundreds of thousands of real, potential readers, the Substack mafia will shut down your business and keep the contacts. At no instance will they initiate you to the top.

We have been warning writers about the Substack pyramid ponzi scheme, but, alas, writers are desperate, so they all want quick money-making schemes that promise viral audiences (that don’t exist). Substack pyramid scheme will come down, but before that, its top tier channels get rich, very rich.

The average ‘entrepreneur’ on Substack must spend between $4000 to $8000 per month to recruit new subscribers, which includes other social media marketing and advertising campaigns that link back to the Substack application. Lots of multi-million-dollar publishers, fashion, film, and music industries, as well as corporate media and government agencies are setting up Substack accounts.

Businesses are here NOT for the literary reviews but for the money laundering opportunities, dah!

Then there’s what I love to call the has-been celebrity brigades—established authors and successful journalists, abandoned by traditional publishing and outmatched by AI artificial intelligence. Their personal websites are dead, their social media a graveyard of paid followers (to look “in demand,” the rate on Facebook, Instagram, and Xitter is currently $50 per 100 real-person subscriptions, better hurry!).

They repost their life’s work on Substack, hoping the algorithm would bless them with totally free exposure (because they deserve it!). Substack does not compute such legacy fame and old-world privileges—only their ranking on the Ponzi pyramid scheme, and theirs is low and too late: As soon as those has-been celebrity brigades run out of legacy funds, Substack de-prioritizes them (no longer shown to others), scrapes their useful email lists, and (at best) keeps them on assisted living mode, fed with “pity clicks.” Substack, as everybody knows, happily scavenges the contact lists and writings of the dead.

A Ponzi scheme must expand or collapse. It inevitably collapses when new recruiting becomes impossible.

There are strong warning signs. A Ponzi scheme begins to collapse if there is even the slightest decline in new recruits! Substack MUST aggressively grow—and ALL THE TIME—or else its late investors start to see no returns on their investment and ask dirty questions.

Therefore, Substack cannot afford to implement any growth-limiting measures such as “quality control,” “licensing,” or any “formal accreditation” process. It won’t even ask you for your qualifications. Just the method of payment suffices. It desperately recruits podcasters (audio content), vloggers (video content), and political commentators (propaganda). It recruits gamers, female models, geeks (collections, reviews, toy content), and the message board trolls from the dark net (responsible for memes and symbolism). All those new recruits will never get enough clicks and likes here, but Substack tells them: recruit more friends, they’ll pay it to you in clicks and likes! Share subscribers!

Those low tier subscribers are the ‘zeros’ added to the Substack scheme to make it look growing in numbers, in order to deceive lure in the latest investors who in reality are just used to pay off the earlier ones.

At the bottom of the Substack pyramid scam, we now have hundreds of thousands of freelancers, IT guys, reporters, travel writers, activists, bloggers, hobbyists, divorced dads and your attention-seeking mom. Who’s going to read them? Nobody! There just aren’t enough readers on earth to read all that garbage. But that doesn’t bother Substack. Just register an email account for your dog as well and join Substack! (This works, and for your twin Siamese cats too!)

“As part of our Creative Writing course at Boston College, we signed up for Substack, all 40 of us.”
“Did your instructor recruit you?”
“Yes.”

—Denise

“Oh, but I am an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, I write intelligibly about Narcissism. I shall be noticed!” Sure, Doc, you and the other 80 million PhDs in 2025! At this stage of the scheme, Substack turned into the OnlyFans for cerebral persons (a prostitution website) to showcase their “mind work.” Except no one’s paying for "mind work." Everyone can google (almost) everything, and for free!

In order to become the go-to-expert on any topic, one needs to have the backing of the oligarchs, the media mafia, a government, or the Substack family itself. This is the only way—pending approval of the US military and mythical Zion—to (unnaturally) insert yourself at the top of the pyramid.

And that’s why Substack took us down.

Meanwhile, climbing on Substack leads to dead-end slops, tips on Substack are fake (paid for), viral posts are just marketing campaigns, the Substack economy is fake (gambling, money laundering, activism), and 90% of comments are generated by machines. The only thing that’s real about Substack is the pyramid—because it crushes down on all its authors!

Everyone still thinks they can game the system and win big time in 2025. It never happens. If you join now, you only make the top channels very, very rich and embarrass yourself with shameful “pity clicks.”

For now, we’re stuck here performatively—our existing supporters deserve access to the guaranteed content. But growth? Exposure? A greater audience? Substack made sure that’s over for us.

Pigs.

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