Building Anti-Fragility into Your Digital Ecosystems
It’s a really good idea to put all of your Substack content into a private file that lives natively on your own website. Not only do you increase resilience in your own digital ecosystems, making them way less fragile in the face of change, but you boost SEO and AIO for your own self-generated writing and ideas.
Substack is still a platform with an obligation to perform and expand margins for investors / stakeholders. I’ve been saying this for years. It’s preying on your hope that it’s “different” than the other platforms. It wants you to believe that its a world away from the world.
But here we all are still getting dopamine from likes and thinking that a lack of likes is a reflection of our value professionally within another algorithm.
Substack is still the Master’s house.
Protopian, pro-tech ways to build anti-fragility into your digital ecosystems while holding some resistance:
On Squarespace, you can choose to not have your content scanned by AI. I don’t know about other platforms, but this is helpful. Because while it can’t be used to train LLM’s it will still rank in SEO and AIO, making your content searchable but not usable by Chat / Claude etc.
Google’s search engine now values original ideas, idiosyncratic thought, style, and taste in its ranking systems. Use that information however you want. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to share your real voice / face online.
You can have a separate email list to do “marketing” content outside of Substack. Just tell your people that you’re doing that. Those who want to stay in the loop about your paid offerings will stay. And those who aren’t ready will just stay on Substack. You have to do the inner work to unhook your value from when someone unsubscribes. Be gracious and let people know that they can leave and come back whenever.
Hire a virtual assistant to help you keep your archives tidy. What you post on IG and Substack needs to be cross-posted onto your own native websites and sent in emails off-platform. Your years of virtual archives are more valuable than bitcoin. If someone can point to something you wrote in 2018 pre-algorithm and pre-ai that connects to the work you’re doing now, you’re going to be fine but you have to do the leg work to take care of your archives.
Get more nuanced with your AI / Tech policy. Over the next 5 - 7 years, things are going to get weirder. The boundaries between flesh and tech are already starting to blur as we are being forced into a world that is being run on a machine. While you’re adjusting your AI / Tech policy, clarify your values. Your resistance only works when you’re willing to get close enough to the fire to learn what it is or how it works. Otherwise its not truly resistance, its just fear.
