> Twitter has been completely worthless anyway for promoting my Substack channel. In their Dashboard, it doesn't even show up in the top five referers.

It's always been very difficult to get people to leave Twitter. This is why their ad business is worth so little. Advertisers pay for clicks, and Twitter just doesn't deliver them very well.

Google is in the enviable position of advertising X to a queue of X-seeking people. For almost all X.

Most other advert platforms try to say “hey mate over here, stop your trail of thought and look at this…”

TV and radio says “ha gotcha now let me force this ad down your throat”

Maybe they should people purchase things within twitter.

Same.

Most of my readers come from HN, reddit or substack itself. Now it's mostly Python so it makes sense a tech oriented medias will be reading more about it.

Still, the ban on substack by twitter means that, while a #python tweet gets some view, the same with an article to substack tanks bit time.

I'm curious how you're dealing with Reddit: some of the mods don't even respond to a direct message; they just say "read the guidelines." And then their auto-mod deletes your post.

I have a very old account that has been mostly posting quality content. I also take great care of writing content that I wish I would I read myself.

So when I post it, it's congruent.

Basically, either you find a way to cheat, or you climb the ladder. I'm terrible at cheating.

If you post the entirety of the content to Reddit itself and just leave the link in your profile, you can often get away with it

I’m curious, what works better than Twitter for this kind of use case? Mastodon is better than Twitter for me, but it still is very slow.

I'm not on Mastodon. So that works?

Actually, this site is usually the best, and Facebook (the latter might reflect my audience).

Reddit subs tend to censor any attempt at self-promotion, which you can't blame them for, I guess. And StackExchange is the absolute worst. The level of asshole-ness there has to be seen to be believed.

Is it really asshole-ness?

YC/Reddit/SE being good/bad/worse for self-promotion seems to be 100% in line with the intended use of these sites.

I'm hardly the first person to single out SE / SO for trashing.

Maybe I'm just "good at tweeting" but my average top-level tweets have at least as many views as I have followers. The "bad" ones are maybe around 15-25%.

However, if I link to an external article or something, the percentage of people who actually click on it is relatively tiny.

You must be good, TBD, but when I look at other people's tweets, they also have way fewer views than followers.

We've had the same experience, Twitter has led to almost no incremental readers. Even our most popular posts don't get much of an audience there.

It is as if people have lives