For other Substack authors: my curious subscriber and follower counts over the past 4 years and 1 year
I guess this, combined with my X throttling, puts me in David Hughes' Camp 3
Total subscribers and total followers compared over the past 1 year and past 4 years, which is when I began writing on Substack.
To me it seems that once I hit 50,000 subscribers the algorithms began beating me down on my subscriber #s, but did not do anything regarding followers, as best I can tell.
First, the growth in followers and subscribers over 4 years:
Total subscribers over 4 years:
Here is a closer look at just 1 year’s growth in followers, with 73K to 103K and a fairly even curve, though the past few days look funny
Subscribers during the past 12 months hit a wall: From 47K to 50K during the first 6 months, with a slight overall loss during the second 6 months of the year.
Hundreds of thousands have crowded onto SS post election, lefties for the money, and then MSM shedding thousands of journalists, AND I suspect the deep state is suppressing the reach of those with whom they disagree and promoting those of whom they approve. Esp the anti Trumpers, I fully expect their paid subscribers are real money wise, but fake people, the NGOs are standing them up to try to show the Dems still have power. You can tell by the lack of engagement. That means the algorithms don’t promote the early adopters the way they used to. And esp us on the dissident side, politics and health especially. I doubt if SS admin is aware of this, it’s a version of smurfing, how Act Blue used to log donations from working class neighborhoods.
Same thing happened to me, Meryl, only my free subscriber #s started bleeding once I hit 45k and are now down to 43k. Paid subscribers started falling off a cliff in January 2024 (after Substack introduced AI, coincidentally) at ever-accelerating speeds.