Is Substack Now Turning Completely Fake?

Cross-Publishing on Substack? -- Warning: You might earn a few more bucks, but you are only losing your credibility...

Are you a frog in the fish?

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Substack made cross-publishing available about 10 days ago. However, only a few days ago, I noticed that small “authors” started to cross-publish sources of questionable value.

That can mean three things:

1. The “small” author, who has been authentic until now, is now linked to a source, whose credibility hampers that of the small authors;

2. The “small” author wants to receive more visitors (#1 doesn’t exclude #2), either for traffic or for an increase of paying “subscribers.”

3. It is a lure that small an authentic authors set up in order to attract attention, which will spread their good contents over the place to a lot larger audience than they have been receiving before.

Either way, the game is clear for all sides.

At the beginning, I warned my fellow authors that combining sources would be a good idea, but cross-publishing would only attract unnecessary attention, so we should simply place links to each other’s articles in our articles or in comment sections.

However, the contradiction that small-timers cross-publish questionable sources presents, prevails.

Is it possible that even small authors’ sites have been mirrored by now? I did notice a substantial decrease in the number of commenters about two weeks ago, which has been followed by a number of “glitches” on a daily basis. Based on what I have known about my fellow authors, it is highly possible that the whole site has not been turned into something absolutely fake…