Moving Forward

The future of this Substack and open dialogue.

Image from Photo Stock Editor

Apologies as I have remarked in Spring of 2022 that I would alert readers ahead of time before putting myself on the job market. However, given current circumstances I decided to do some job searching and as of this moment will be starting a full-time position within a week.

Now, I bring this up mostly due to the fact that, because of uncertainties in my available time, I’m not sure what the output of this Substack will be in the near future.

This is honestly the gist of what this post will be about, but I thought it relevant to maybe expound upon some of the thoughts that have been circulating in recent months and what has led to the position I am in right now.

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For those unaware my initial start of this Substack was due to the fact that I was let go of my previous job, a job in which I was argued to be a great employee, due to the fact that I denied getting the COVID vaccines in Fall 2021.

I don’t bring up the comment about being “a great employee” to gloat. It’s more the fact that you can be considered one of the top employees where you work only to be let go suddenly for not kowtowing to the vaccine narrative.

Given everything going on and my growing skepticism for everything related to COVID, I began this Substack partially as a way to vent my frustrations while also trying to piece together the events that were taking place. In reality, a lot of this became an eye-opener into the scientific process and made me a more critical reader of papers- something I wasn’t really taught during my undergrad.

It also shed some light on the fact that science communication is horrendous, to the extent that most mainstream outlets won’t even dare assess a study and instead would relay information based on what other “experts” have said. However, in many cases, people are presented with only the most superficial of information, being told more of what to think on a topic rather than how to assess to information and think for yourself.

Paired with the overwhelming dependency that our culture has on social media, we are now at a point where any semblance of critical thinking is disincentivized for quick dopamine hits that feel like learning but really don’t leave one actually informed.

It’s because of this model of disseminating information that I wanted to at least try to break down studies rather than tell readers what a study says. It’s one of the reasons why I initially used a lot of excerpts from studies and also why I would include so many figures in my earlier posts. It was done so that I could show readers where I was getting my information from. It was my attempt (whether fruitful or not) to both gain an understanding of how to evaluate studies while also showing readers how they can break down studies that they may come across.

If anything, the biggest thing I can takeaway since starting this endeavor is to not rely on secondhand accounts on studies. It’s always best to go to the primary source and see for yourself whether what is being said is true or not. More importantly, it’s critical to figure out if you have the knowledge or critical thinking skills needed to ensure that you don’t immediately just agree with the conclusions of a study. In many cases researchers may mention something in an Abstract that may not be validated by their own study. Many researchers may also overgeneralize or over-extrapolate their data, among other methodological issues that may occurred in order to get an answer researchers want.

I won’t say I’ve perfected “peer review” or independent analyses of studies, but I’m far better at being more discerning and critical than I was two years prior.

That being said, over time now I’ve had a growing, nagging feeling through all of the work that I’ve done, and it’s essentially that researching kind of sucks. It’s tedious, laborious, time-consuming, and more importantly you don’t really know if you’ve hit upon something until you’re weeds deep into some rabbit hole you’ve went down.

There have been many times where I spent hours and hours researching a topic only to come up to a dead end, or maybe I spent hours looking at a “bombshell” study thinking that there was something there…only to find out that it wasn’t actually a good study to begin with.

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To put it into context, there are some articles such as my “News Roundup” bits that can be sped through in a few hours, mostly because it’s a commentary on news that is out there. Some studies, if short such as the one on Saturday, can be put out in a few hours as well.

However, in many cases an article may take days, or even sometimes weeks to procure the information needed. It requires reading through several articles, piecing together some of the information, and attempting to contextualize them around a specific hypothesis or idea as I had done for my Anthology Series post.

Because I don’t ever know what information is pertinent, I have to look up many different articles to see what is out there on a given topic. This is especially true if it’s a topic I am not knowledgeable about, which quite frankly is A LOT of topics!

To give an example, here are the tabs for my series on HHV that I covered several months back:

The second one I had to crop a bit more since some of those tabs weren’t related to HHV. Also, note that this doesn’t mean I actually read through every single article. But the point is that in writing my series I had to try and look for any articles that I could related to HHVs, HHV reactivation, HHV and possible post-viral syndrome, etc.

It’s usually starting from a pool of several dozen articles where I try and figure out what information may be pertinent, but again you may never really know what is pertinent until you form your ideas or read through studies.

It takes a lot of time and effort to try and piece together information. I’m not lying when I say that I probably put in more work into this Substack than I did in my old job (which had some points with high down time, but also had moments were I felt like I was doing the job of 2-3 other people).

But doing all of this research has its own toll, and over time I started experiencing a good deal of self-inflicted burnout. It became more difficult to put in so much work and effort over time, partially due to the fact that many readers may not have the time to read through all of these articles. Others may not be interested in the topics, which is fine since you never know what your readers are interested in unless they tell you.

But recently there has been a growing concern that some readers have taken the position of being told what they want to hear rather than seeing what information is out there. I found it strange that on one of my articles criticizing an OAS study that I lost a noticeable number of subscribers (I believe 10), even though the article was my perspective of why that study in particular was a rather poor study.

Did I lose readers because they thought I was spamming them with posts, or did I lose readers because they didn’t want to hear criticisms of the study or OAS in particular?

I’m not sure, aside from the fact that a dip in subscribers at a time when my subscription count plateaued points to something more than just spam being a reason.

And this seems to be a growing problem as things seem to “die down” for most people. There seems to be a ramping up of conspiracies or ideas that may not readily be substantiated, say the whole EAS fiasco from last Wednesday.

I should remind readers that I think people should be free to post whatever they like, but I am also concerned that financial incentives have driven more clickbait and in-group dynamics.

I personally think people are free to argue whether they think viruses are real or whether they are pathogenic, but what I am rather critical of is the idea that people find it necessary that someone with a dissenting viewpoint align with their own personal views. It’s no longer ,“I don’t believe viruses are pathogenic or real”, but is now, “you keep spreading lies about viruses” or that, “viruses are a myth”, essentially moving from providing an opinion to now dictating what writers should be putting out on their own Substacks.

This goes for religion or even the whole argument over whether vaccines cause autism.

To all of these, my stance has always been that I haven’t done the research myself to come to my own conclusions, and so I always leave open the idea that the probability of anything occurring is non-zero, but also do so with the caveat in saying that I need to do the research myself before I am comfortable with making a conclusion.

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All this to say, the current air surrounding writing on COVID seems to have changed. Paired with a lot of burnout that I have been feeling with researching topics I have found that there’s a large disincentive happening on Subtack.

And this isn’t something that I am alone in feeling. It seems that more people have begun to air their grievances on how Substack is structured.

Consider that, for most of us writing on Substack without a prior following, we are starting from the ground up. We are a drop in a sea of neophyte Substack writers hoping to both write our own thoughts while also being financially compensated for doing so.

Because of this we write and release most of our articles for free with free comments open, because otherwise we would be limiting the very little engagement we already had. You can’t quite paywall content if you have no readers to incentivize into paying.

But this can’t be said for other, more public figures who have an audience already willing to pay them for whatever content they put out. These people are likely to reach into the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of paid readers while many of us struggle to get our very first. Because of this they come in with the ability to, right of the bat, be paid for their work by paywalling content, or by turning of comments except for those who are paid subscribers.

This now creates a dichotomous structure where those of us who start from the bottom are essentially incentivized to not paywall our work, essentially providing content with the belief that there will be some payoff moment in the future that will make all of this worthwhile…if that day ever comes.

It’s a great time for those who can achieve such a point in their Substack career, but the reality is that for many of us this day will likely take a long time for us to reach, if it ever does, meaning that we have to continue to spend hours or days working on posts with the eventual hope that this leads to paid subscribers.

But this assumption also doesn’t work due to the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any correlation between content output/quality of content and conversion into paid members.

Rather, there appears to be a stronger correlation between being a public figure and gaining paid subscribers than there is on putting out actual content, and I caught wind of this months into starting my Substack when I found out that one COVID narrative zealot, a Dr. Eric Ding, had “hundreds of paid subscribers” in 2021-2022.

The only problem was that Dr. Ding wasn’t producing any content on Substack say for two posts (one in 2020 and another in 2021) with one being about what things would be coming to his Substack- both articles which are now paywalled.

Take a look at the time gap between posts as an example. Unfortunately I didn’t screencap this at the time I noticed it. One of the only evidence would be a comment I made on Twitter (X?) at some point between late 2021 and early 2022 (before I was banned) to someone about Dr. Ding’s Substack.

In all honestly, this is rather soul crushing. How do I and other small Substacks compete with those who don’t even need to provide Substack with any content so long as they are a public figure? So it’s not about the content of the person, it’s who the person is that is likely to drive paid members- actual content be damned.

What this tells me is that things are even worse off for us small writers. We really don’t know what game we are playing when writing, we just need to keep writing with some hope that a turning point will come in the future.

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To that, here’s another bit of context for my frustrations. My numbers on Substack, like with many people, weren’t great for the first few months. I think for a long time I had only a handful of paid subscribers (handful even being generous). Probably the biggest tick early on came from my initial post on Molnupiravir’s mutagenicity.

However, the bigger uptick moment happened around the time I posted my Quercetin Anthology Series post. Looking back that post most likely lacks a lot of the scrutiny that I try to provide now, so take the information presented there with that context in mind.

Nonetheless, I spend weeks, up to a month on that post, spending around 10-12 hours on some days reading through articles and trying to write up that series. The dozens of articles I cited at the end I at least made an attempt to read through.

But not much came out of that series. I think engagement was relatively low early on because I just lacked the readership.

That is, until a very big Substack picked up on my series. The Substack mentioned by article, providing some summaries of what I wrote and encouraged people to read my series. That was one of the turning points that at least led to more free and paid members- all of which was great.

However, at the same time, and a feeling that grew more as months went on, I felt a bit of unease with this situation. Now, it wasn’t because the summary of my work was unethical or immoral. I don’t take the article citing my work to have committed such and act.

I think it was more the fact that, spending hours, days, weeks, a month to read and put together my articles I had to release them all for free because I just lacked that audience and readership. At the same time this high profile Substack was able to post a summary of my article behind a paywall.

Again, I don’t think that was immoral or unethical, but at the same time I won’t deny that part of me saw that going down and said, “wow, this kind of sucks”.

This is far less egregious than some instances I have come across where people flat-out copy and paste content from other websites. That should be considered reprehensible, and I’ve seen a few higher profile Substacks doing so. I should be clear that this appears to happen on other websites as well where people seem to just copy and paste entire Substack articles.

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But I’ve been at this for almost two years now, and during that time I have gone into my savings and also relied on the help of others ashamedly. I’m at the point, or really at a point a while back, where I just came to the conclusion that focusing so much on Substack and attempting to do all the research that I do was not financially feasible. I couldn’t keep eating into my savings with the hope that I will have that “one day” moment.

Here’s an example for the salary I made from Substack as well as donations from Ko-fi for my 2022 tax return. The breakdown is this:

• Substack: $5,276

• Ko-fi: $270

So how much income did I made from a year’s work and effort put onto Substack? Around $2.67/hour.

Now, let me be very clear. I am grateful for all of the paid memberships as well as the donations on Ko-fi! I’ve fallen way behind on thanking people for their Ko-fi donations and I sincerely apologize for that. This all does mean a lot to me, especially given that other people have fallen on hard times as well- the economy isn’t too good for anyone.

But all this told me that I couldn’t wait out. I can’t hold out on hope that I can make this an actually feasible job, no matter how much I wish it to be. The reality is that for me, and honestly many others, Substack will be more of a side hustle than a paying gig.

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Anyways, apologies for this long ramble. There’s more I can say but a lot of my thoughts feel jumbled at this moment.

Know that this doesn’t mean I am outright quitting Substack. If anything, the coming week or two may be a slow-down as I get acclimated with being back in the workforce- apologies for asking for Halloween topics and likely not being able to commit to that! To be honest all of this is a bit sudden.

What’s likely to happen is that I may cut back my output, and given my allotted time may put out occasional posts on what I see in the news or other topics that may be of interest but may not take too much time to write about or research. Any long-researched posts will likely be on hiatus as well unfortunately due to time constraints.

I just wanted to be transparent to readers about what’s going on so that they can gauge how to look at this Substack moving forward and whether you would like to continue supporting it.

If you do end up choosing to end your paid membership the least I ask of you is that you consider other smaller Substacks out there. There are many people who would like to make this their full-time job, there are many who are struggling to get recognized or even maintain a viable audience. Before thinking about giving to larger, higher-profile Substacks think about those smaller ones who really are in need of your support. Your paid membership is likely to go a lot farther for those smaller writers than they are for the larger ones.

And thank you all who have supported me through this endeavor, whether free or through paid memberships I’ll be honest and say that I’m surprised that my ramblings have actually garnered the reader size that it has! I do try to avoid thinking that all of this was in vain, especially given the fact that it’s really changed my perception of the world, maybe not to be more cynical but at least to be more skeptical. It also really emphasized why doing your own research is so necessary.

But with that I’ll leave this open to questions people may have, although please note that I may not answer personal questions.