I am having a harder time than usual selling the spots for my 2026 manuscript consultations, which I mainly spread the word about on Facebook and Instagram, and my husband recently raised the question of whether the fact I’m the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit with Meta might be part of the reason why the algorithm is not favouring my content, and I mean, it’s plausible, no?

But even if it’s not, oh my goodness, I have had it with Facebook and Instagram. It’s all AI slop, confused baby boomers, and posts trying to break my heart or make me angry, even when they’re not stealing my work to run the world with AI. After I read the post from the LA Dodgers pitcher whose baby daughter had been stillborn, Instagram just starting showing me random posts about other people’s stillbirths. I only use these platforms on my desktop (um, because having them on the phone is scientifically proven to destroy one’s mental health), which no doubt is impacting my user experience, but that seems like a weird excuse. Most of the posts I’m shown are suggested posts with clickbait about celebrities I don’t know, scam ads for fake companies going out of business, “life update” posts from people I’ve never heard of, and carousel posts by people I don’t follow captioned “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…” about their feelings regarding the elf of the shelf.

Whatever I still get out of Facebook and Instagram is in spite of Facebook and Instagram, and because of the human beings who still take time to post and share there, not because of anything an algorithm has ever delivered to me. Which helps me not feel so bad about my posts getting less traction, because it’s all so unpleasant, and I’m going to have to find a way to run my business and get the word out and promote my books away from Meta at some point anyway, because even when they’re serving me, they’re not really serving me—except maybe by feeding my humanity into their gross capitalism machine.

And it feels good to just admit it—that this is a game that I don’t want to play. Instead of trying to contort my life and my self to deliver whatever fickle thing that we’re all imagining that machine is craving so that we might possibly be rewarded (until it starts wanting a different and we have to change again). It’s a game I’m not playing on Substack either, surely to my detriment. But my sense is that focussing on my blog and using Substack to promote this platform is going to be more rewarding in the long run than becoming a star Substacker, even if the result is that I am a fairly middling Substacker, which feels like FOMO sometimes. And that is something I’m not that used to feeling on the internet, having spent 25 years (more than half my life!) with an online platform. Like, usually, I get to be one of the OGs, but on Substack it’s not like that at all. Sometimes I try a little, and other times I don’t, and the results between the two remain consistent.

So I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like Substack because the opportunity to be paid for my work has been meaningful, in terms practical and otherwise, and also because it’s a platform for my podcast (whose Season 4 will be dropping in January!). I joined Substack about the same time that the Notes timeline was rolled out, and I regret that I never got a chance to experience Substack without it, just because the only reason I came to Substack at all was because I was so tired of the incessant chatter of social media and far too many voice in my head.

But it’s here on the blog where my focus will remain, a decision that limits my reach, perhaps, but also means that I’m in control of what I do, that I’m writing for myself, that the people who matter will find me, and people who don’t only mean that I get to write with the lack of self consciousness that makes creativity possible.