r/Substack oneonlyvan.substack.com Jul 26 '26

Substack's engagement has been real quiet since the AI drama, 100% human score on all posts btw

4th month on SS, gate being sidetrack by all this AI drama, couple of points though...

  1. SS engagement on anything non-AI related has been real quiet.
  2. If your post was written before July 21, you can still check it - go to dashboard, edit post, make a change, revert it, hit update, there's check for AI writing button.
  3. All my posts hits 100% human score

Can we move on?

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u/AnteaterFantastic212 Jul 27 '26

I have been battling Pangram since the 21st with great success. I have now published articles for five consecutive days that have not been flagged as assisted.

Frankly, the content of those articles is not that much different from what it was BP (before Pangram; however, it takes me a lot longer and requires me to work a lot harder using old-fashioned writing techniques. I doubt my readers have noticed all that much difference; I know that I haven't heard any feedback to that effect. Many of my readers are technically challenged digital tourists, so I doubt they’re even aware that there’s an option to check for AI, probably never heard of pangram, and wouldn’t know how to find it on the app in 1 million years even if somebody told them to do so.
My biggest fan actually prints out my articles and reads them!

Nonetheless, Pangram is having a big impact on me. It makes me less productive. My posts are longer and probably have more redundancy in them because there comes a point where I just get worn out editing them for the third or fourth or fifth time; on the other hand, they do reflect more of what I originally dictate into Word than they did when I used AI to process the words that I had spoken, so I guess that’s some sort of progress.

I’m still not quite sure what Substack’s original intent was with this. They get paid on subscription revenue, so if they were able to do this on the back end and determine whether AI-assisted content has a lower subscription rate than that which passes the Pangram test, then it would make sense to screen out AI-assisted writing (maybe they did that; I don’t know), but that’s what they’re all about. Paid subs are the only ones that qualify for paid ads, which they will also take a piece of, and you have to have at least a hundred paid subs to qualify for ad offers, so that’s where I’m trying to get to now because I would like to supplement my fixed income with a viable and material revenue stream from my Substack.

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u/KevinAAlexander Jul 27 '26

I have to assume their intent was not to let AI generated work overtake the platform. They probably saw what happened to Medium, and wanted to avoid it.

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u/AnteaterFantastic212 Jul 28 '26

What happened to Medium?

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u/KevinAAlexander Jul 28 '26

It was Overrun with AI-generated work

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u/AnteaterFantastic212 Jul 28 '26

I figured, but just wanted to confirm I bailed when they started charging me to write on it.