Two Thousand Subscribers and Growing

Status report on subscriptions and my health; the first since June 1, 2023

I am a bit exhausted, but not dead. The picture itself is not necessarily a joke these days: https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/the-weaponization-of-exercise

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This is probably my only publication for the weekend. My reasons are twofold:

1. I want to give more time for my readers to digest and discuss my last piece, which is easily one of the most important ones I’ve ever published on Substack.

2. Although I spare you from the begging inserts that disrupt articles, your monetary support enables me to continue working and, eventually, perhaps to focus on this project full-time.

A new anniversary

The first anniversary for this site was January 17, 2023, when the number of subscribers exceeded 1,000. The next one was May 6, 2023, when it turned one year old. Today, on October 27, 2023, the number of subscribers has exceeded 2,000.

Considering the emotional intelligence, human maturity, and intellectual capacity needed for being able to process my articles, 2,000 is a lot more than I ever thought would be possible.

Gratitude

First of all, let me express my gratitude for your support and participation that makes this site possible. Although the time I can devote to this endeavor is closely linked to the amount of paid subscriptions and donations, your contributions are often more valuable than whatever money can buy. I also hope that friendships are forming between readers as well. As I promised at the very beginning, everything on this site is still free, and the only way I can express my gratitude for paid subscriptions or for mugs of coffee at Buymeacoffee is by offering bonuses¹.

What’s so special?

What makes this site special is mostly its readers, who are able and willing to think on their own without having to agree with me or with anyone else. Only a few people can put up with the constant cognitive dissonance that searching for new information and maintaining tentative models for one’s image of the world and of one’s own self. Without you, this site would not exist.

I intend my project to keep informing, entertaining, and inspiring without any coercion whatsoever. I’m also determined to run a civilized show in the comment sections, where readers can meet and exchange ideas in a respectful manner, while sharing and combining valuable information. My writings, while striving to remain easy to comprehend, utilize deductive thinking with conjecturing in a global interpretive frame in order to ensure unique and consistent contents that often precede other authors by days, weeks, months, or even years, and its predictive power allows for more time to prepare for the future with personalized strategies. My conjecturing is often unique. Despite the journalistic presentation, many of my articles do not go obsolete; I often update them with new contents and links to relevant articles from the Web. They are all interrelated, and you can use the search function under “Archive” at the top of the homepage, if you want to collect information that is relevant to your specific interest. In essays that cover a wide range of subjects, I demonstrate numerous deductive paths and suggest conclusions that you cannot find anywhere else.

The interruption

My last status report dates back to June 1, 2023. In the meanwhile, I managed to fall ill from one or more of the unknown poisons aimed at the population, and nearly died. In retrospect, it is a miracle that I survived my hospitalization, which may have happened only because I turned down several diagnostic and treatment options that would have done me in. In mid-August, I accepted hospitalization, because I was approaching my end and I wanted my wife to be able to collect my life insurance. As a bonus, I also figured that “medical” treatment would finish me off a lot faster than the 2-3 weeks I would have had left otherwise. Treatment after discharge could have easily become terminal, but I simply ignored it and have been using alternative methods that has allowed at least partial recovery. Chances are, I’ll never fully heal, but I’ll stick around as long as I can, which can be today or ten to twenty years from now. Yet to my surprise, subscribers kept signing up even during the months, when I was barely able to publish anything due to my worsening or critical condition.

The numbers

Since June 1, 2023, subscriptions increased from 1,481 to 2,000, amounting to an increase of 106 subscribers a month with a steady linear growth. The good news is that the site is still a long way from attracting too much unwanted attention, which I expect to happen around 10 thousand daily visitors. In the last 30 days, there were 62.6 thousand visitors, which still places me very much in the safe zone. Popular sites are usually either fake from the beginning or are hijacked beyond a certain point, anyway. Also, and increasing number of “renegade”“authors” and “activists” are bots, replacing the agents who are no longer needed for the job. Some of them, as if they were human, are even promoting and supporting each other. If you find me fully cooperating with bad company², contradicting myself, giving live interviews, or making a public appearance, you can be sure that this site has been invaded or hijacked, and I was forced to publish nonsense or have been replaced with an agent or an AI deepfake³.

After 17 months, I have is 23 paying supporters who, as few as their number might sound, are extremely helpful for my wife and me. My wife has been a major contributor to this page from the beginning, and it wouldn’t be the same without her. Also, without her, I would not have survived my illness.

On June 1, our annual income from my supporters was $2.459, minus the approximately 15-20% deduction by Substack. After the report, we received $225 through Buymeacoffee, minus the 10% transaction cost, but not a penny after a week or two. The number of paying supporters increased to 26 by July 31st, and the yearly total went up to $4,031. That lasted until August 31st, when it started dropping, despite the steady rise in subscriptions. From early mid-May until the end of August, I was severely ill, and hardly managed to publish anything, which may have contributed to the loss of two paying supporters, which lowered the annual gross revenue on Substack to $3,701 by September 15th with 24 paying supporters. By the 27th of October, after losing another paying subscriber, annual revenue dropped to $3,551.

This site is still bringing in nearly ten dollars a day, for which my wife and I are thankful. Obviously, I have to do other things to pay the bills, but I still spend 10-12 hours a day in front of the computer, reading, answering comments, keeping the site safe from uncivilized behavior, bots, morons, and agents, while working on new articles and improving old ones.

Working together

Your comments are often integrated into my articles, because you either inspire new thoughts or provide alternative aspects for thinking, additional information, and novel ideas.

In the last 4-6 weeks, I have been trying to make up for the time lost to my illness. It seems to have worked, because the number of daily visitors are back over 3,000 again on good days, sometimes hitting four thousand or more.

Finances

Your financial support is also essential. For annual subscriptions, you are also allowed to enter an amount that is lower than the default. You can turn a monthly subscription off and on periodically, if you feel that my daily articles are not worth the asking price. My prices are meant to express the value, while I am not placing any limitations on free access. Buymeacoffe is also an option:

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rayhorvz

I hope to stay active and helpful as long as I am around and this forum remains operational.

As you know, I am not using the all-too-common begging inserts in my articles (although according to Substack, they double the number of paid subscriptions), because I find them irritating, disruptive, and humiliating for everyone involved. Instead, based on the transparency provided here, I trust that you can decide on your own if you are able and willing to support the site with a few dollars.

Respectfully,

Ray

1. If you are an annual subscriber, I would like to offer more bonuses for your second year, but I’d need your ideas.

2. No matter what my opinion is about other authors, I address them with respect and stay on the subject. Verbal abuse is a form of violence, and I’ve had enough of that in my life.

3. Settings on Substack contain the following: authors can enable or disable

Block AI training

This setting indicates to AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard that their models should not be trained on your published content. This will only apply to AI tools which respect this setting, and blocking training may limit your publication's discoverability in tools and search engines that return AI-generated results. For more: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot