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Devon Brewer's avatar

I want to expand on a comment that Jennifer Depew made about the poor search engine coverage of Substack. See this interesting article about how a Substack author struggled to get his Substack indexed by Google: https://rsilt.substack.com/p/how-i-got-my-substack-to-be-google. Substack engineers its platform to inhibit search engine indexing. Why would it do that? Consistent with Fast Eddy and others' thoughts, I suspect that it serves to make Substack a ghetto. Readers are forced to "live" within the Substack ecosystem to learn what information is in it. And outsiders remain ignorant of the content within Substack through its invisibility in search engines. Interestingly, the Mojeek search engine does index Substack partially through a separate link on its search page (www.mojeek.com), which is an indirect admission of Substack's isolated position on the web. Mojeek also seems to be a relatively good search engine, with less apparent bias than almost every other search engine I've tried.

If Substack were about making money and spreading information broadly, it would do everything it could to get Substack content indexed by search engines.

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Andreas Oehler's avatar

The latter, Eddy. Substack allows dissenting voices to study the traction some topics get, then work on countering those with a flurry of conflicting messages on the topic to drown the truth in half-truths, semi-truths, half-lies and blatant lies, to muddy the waters. And produce blasts of counter-measure headlines - 90% of ppl don't read past the headline, I am being told... So, it's a sandbox environment for Big Brother, supported by a small army of volunteers (me including), wannabe grifters off the reading public (Sacha&Co), etc. The readership of Substack is the sounding board, in the sandbox. The masses don't even know it exists. Right?

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