Is this thing on?

A brief interlude addressed to Substack Notes users

Hey gang—

I don’t come here a lot—hardly ever, as a matter of fact. I just feel I don’t have a lot to say on the fly that would be meaningful or of value. How I write is exactly why my Substack is called “The Percolate”: the result of a slow drip, a process of distillation. This is necessary because at any moment, my mind is a cacophony of thoughts—and to share these in real-time? That’s what my journal—or voicenotes to my best friends, bless their patient souls—are for. Online is not the place for my unfiltered mental guff.

And yet—that’s the only way to be heard, isn’t it? To be noisiest. To say the most. Because to post selectively is to choose obscurity, thanks to that foe of discernment, The Algorithm. So I have to content myself with nobody ever really hearing what I have to say, probably. Because you don’t need to be privy to my every thought, just like I don’t need to be privy to everyone else’s.

Unfortunately—unfortunately—our willingness to participate in this honk-off has become tied to our livelihoods. Substack appeared on the market as the answer to writers wanting to make a living from our craft. Somehow (I mean, clearly intentionally on Substack’s part), it has become yet another platform that prioritises saturation as a strategy and demotes substance for stats.

What is engagement like on Notes for those of us who don’t post very much? Is anyone seeing this?

That’s all. Hello from the void.