Elena Rossini ⁂
@_elena@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

File under: digital media literacy

The great @molly0xfff has a mini-thread up on Bluesky revealing how her Substack dashboard shows steady growth... despite the fact she stopped using that platform a year and a half ago: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3ltd6biesvk2r

Substack's "network effect" may be an illusion. More on this here: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3ltd6fud6jc2r

I'm really happy I left SS for Ghost in January 2024 and I never looked back... and yes, the abbreviation is not that coincidental

🔗: https://news.elenarossini.com/this-is-what-resistance-to-the-digital-coup-looks-like/
Grow Fediverse
@growfediverse@my-place.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@_elena@molly0xfff as an advertiser who existed across Meta and Twitter’s whole life cycle, can confirm — and they’ve been doing it for a LONG long time. We could tell because as a digital product we could directly track end-to-end adoption by source in the earliest days that they existed. There’s a natural rate of adoption in a given advertising space. Then when they started to “take off” as a brand, and before they had rolling A/B deployments, they’d do a set of patch notes and you could literally see these weird nonsense jumps in click rates where clicks were going through the roof, but not an inch of movement on the rest of the funnel. Or we’d sift through “who” was clicking/commenting and find oodles of obvious trash accounts. Make no mistake that their new Generative AI profiles are meant to scam their real “users”, the advertisers, so that they’ll be paying to show their wares to bots. (And advertisers won’t notice because their exec suite are leaning on the same kinds of bots to measure the KPIs now 🙃 , the Profit Ouroboros strikes again). It was estimated by Imperva Threat Research last year that over 50% of all internet traffic is not by humans.
vladcampos
@vladcampos@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@_elena @molly0xfff I had a similar experience. Even after I sent a goodbye email, I kept getting new subscribers almost every day.

I tried to fix that, but Substack's help page says that there is no way to keep the sent issues published while simultaneously removing the subscribe button. So I ended up deleting the entire newsletter.

🤔 I see why they do that now.