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The Substack Experiment So Far

2 months ago361 words

I've been writing blog posts over on ∞ my Substack account ∞ for the past few months. But have I been wasting my time?? Here are the stats for the 15 posts I've written there since June (from latest to oldest):



The OPENED percentage probably means the number of subscribers who got an email then actually clicked the link in it to view the post. Or maybe just opening the email counts? I don't know.

The view counts are a lot lower than the posts here, though I wonder about the relevance of factors like time or how views are measured (my code for this site might be missing some way to exclude bots or something).

The most viewed post is about money, so I thought that might be the reason why... though it's also the one linked to from a front-page blog post here, so it's most likely because of that.

I tried switching over to Substack because it relieved some anxiety about managing behind-the-scenes aspects of my own site, and it has an actual text editor for writing posts, which I've never bothered to make for myself here. It also sends emails to subscribers when I write a post, which doesn't happen with posts here.

If posting there is just losing me what little attention I've managed to retain, though, well...

I don't know. Another reason I've been posting there instead is because I've been focusing less on games stuff recently. I still want to finish making my games! But the life situation stuff is robbing me of the motivation to work on them, so I know I need to address some parts of that first. And I'm trying to.

And I always feel weird about trying to draw attention to what's essentially me rambling about my personal life.

I'll post any big updates about my games here too, for sure, but I haven't exactly had any of those for a while!

Anyway, I've been wondering whether to add a widget thing for Substack posts to this site. I'll be curious to know whether that changes anything, when I do.