Scamming Substack?
How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform
Welcome to You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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This essay is a cultural critique and personal observation about the stylistic trends emerging in online writing and the increasing use of AI tools in content creation. It does not allege or assert that any specific individual is definitively using AI deceptively or unethically, nor does it claim knowledge of the authorship of any quoted or paraphrased content.
In this Science of Storytelling special you will read:
Why I suspect popular Substackers might be using AI to entirely or substantially write viral essays
Why this matters
Advice for human writers on survival in the AI age
The exact ChatGPT prompt you can use to create your own bestselling Substack!
About two weeks after the launch of my Substack newsletter, I noticed the platform seemed to have evolved its own unique yet highly generic style of writing. I’d been trying to create personal essays, using memoir and insights from psychology. I soon began seeing wildly successful pieces – with thousands of likes, thousands of restacks and hundreds of comments, including from a bestselling Substacker who has hundreds of paid subscribers – that were attempting roughly the same thing. Curious, and wondering what I could learn from these masters of my new universe, I started reading.
The essays felt brooding and deep and insightful in tone, but I struggled to get to the end of them. None of their content stayed with me. I thought they were probably written by young adults, for young adults. There was a deepity-ness to the pieces: a surface profundity under which there was little actual meaning. Their most interesting quality was their style. I made a brief observation on Notes, screenshotting the following three quotes from two different writers who had spookily similar phraseology:
“There’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t come with sobbing or panic or sleepless nights…”
“There’s a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too little, but from doing too much of what drains your soul.”
“There’s a silence that follows most men. Not because they have nothing to say but because they’ve never been taught how to say it.”
These three essays had 12,913 likes, 627 comments and 2,973 restacks between them. My only comment on the Note was ‘The Substack style’. Underneath it, a talented memoirist and writing teacher I know from the platform commented, “I suspect lots of people will relate to this. Is it from one of your posts?”
“Not mine!” I humbly replied.
Over the next few weeks, I kept having these kinds of essays recommended to me on Notes. I said to my wife, “It’s so fascinating. Substack has already evolved its own unique writing style. People absolutely love it.” In my most recent book I’d written about the tendency of groups to develop their own special insider language. I wondered if this might make for a neat case study.
As time went on, I noticed one of these authors was posting with exhausting frequency. “How is she managing to pump these out so quickly?” I wondered. It took me about three days to write an essay, often more. “It’s almost as if…” And then I thought, “Oh yes! Of course. I am a fucking idiot.”
Before I continue, I must stress that I don’t know if any of the pieces quoted in this essay are written by or with significant help from AI. I am suspicious, but suspicion is not a fact. I might be wrong. I have decided not to directly link to any writers, partly for this reason, and partly because doing so is ultimately not necessary. The only effect might be to encourage a pile-on, and what would be the point of that?
Firstly, the style. To give you a taste of the kind of thing I mean, here are three essay openers. To make it fun, and also make the point, we’ll turn it into a game. One of these openers is from a viral Substack essay that has 14,580 likes, 212 comments and 4,712 restacks. The other two took ChaptGPT a few seconds to generate using my special Substack Style prompt. Can you spot the difference? (Both the prompt and the answer will be revealed at the end of this essay)