HN user
Via Substack's own recommendation algorithm, Substack Notes, and by perusing the leaderboards, both of which have been a thing on the platform for a while now. Substack's social media side is very Twitter-esque. Writers you follow "restack" publications (some of which are full of AI slop, unbeknownst to the restacker) and the algorithm also inserts "writers" you haven't encountered into your feed. ("Writers" is in scare quotes for a reason.)
The author has since changed it, but seems to have made it even smaller, for some reason? Guess I'll just crank my zoom up to 150%...
The author has since changed the main body font to a slightly more readable serif, but decided (for some reason) to make it comically tiny compared to the size of his headers.
The author admitted to using AI.
but substack is mostly just another twitter low-engagement farm
That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.
... then they find out that the golem is actually just outsourcing all the "work" to a small army of pissed off, underpaid, chain-smoking imps. The punchline being that GolemAI is "actually imps."
I also suspect Terry Pratchett would have had a lot to say about this sentence: "Pratchett’s [pocket editions] were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty." And this one: "It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves."
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
Thanks for understanding. I never implement blocks on my site lightly.
Apologies. :( Since you say you've never visited the website before, then that means you're either in one of the countries or in one of the residential IP ranges that I've had to block. I had to do that a while back, as I'd say roughly 99.9% of the traffic I received from those areas was malicious in nature (e.g. constantly spamming the site 24/7 for .env variables and whatnot, as well as crawling every single page on the site hundreds or even thousands of times every day). I couldn't block this traffic at the individual IP level, as there's simply too much of it, and they just move on to a different IP address when they're blocked.
I can't stand the thought of blocking an actual human being who just wants to look at my site, but at the same time, what do you do? Just let the site be hammered by crawlers and scrapers 24/7 for the sake of less than a handful of human visitors every once in a while?
People who don't run websites (I'm not saying this is you, just in general) have no idea how bad the crawling/scraping problem is right now. I don't even WANT to use Cloudflare, but I feel like I have no choice. It's either use Cloudflare, or pay an arm and a leg to host a hobby website and then have all my bandwidth chewed up by the crawlers and scrapers.
The people and companies who run these bots are making the internet such a hostile place. It's especially infuriating that so many of them don't even identify themselves with user agents, and hide behind residential IPs instead.
EDIT: Oh, and I can confirm: I investigated the ray ID, and yes, it was unfortunately a country block that triggered it. I receive a huge amount of bad traffic from your country every single day (mostly credential exploits), and I'm sorry you got caught up unintentionally in that block. I added an exception that should hopefully work, though, in the event that you do still want to visit.
That is a standard Cloudflare response when a URL is blocked. It was a temporary block affecting ALL traffic to the URL while I updated the post, not a block targeted at anyone in particular.
Sorry, I am the author: that block was just temporary and affected ALL traffic to that URL while I updated the post. The block was not targeted at anyone in particular. I never intended for that post to reach as many people as it did. :/ I have a very small audience of people who follow my writing, so it was kind of devastating to see comments here likening me and people like me to "a group that goes around burning libraries." Cheers to everyone who kept it civil.