Twenty-six months ago I shared what we should all learn about online publishing by none other than Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, who was named one of America’s most effective communicators on the threat of climate change by the New York Times in 2016.

In that post, I explained how and why Prof. Hayhoe’s strategy of “effective communication” was instead really fragile and could backfire any moment, because, in a nutshell, it consisted of:

1. get an account on as many social media platforms as possible

2. post as much as you can on each platform...

3. but optimizing every bit of “content” for the platform on which you will post it

Now, how could that strategy possibly be wrong? Isn’t that the same thing that makes thousands of “creators” really influential and rich? Sure it is. And yet, it is a dumb, shortsighted strategy because, as I wrote in 2023, “depending on any platform that is as unaccountable as a sovereign rogue state to “share” anything relevant is anything but smart for both sides of the page, publishers and readers.”

For concrete examples of “rogue state behavior”, check out my 2023 post. The news now is that, when I wrote that post, Prof. Hayhoe had already been suffering the limits of her strategy for five years:

Quoting from what she posted on Facebook yesterday (emphasis mine):

“In August 2018, Facebook decided to label “clean energy” and “climate change” as politically sensitive topics.”

“Not only that, but they did not allow me to register my (already verified) account to post on those topics. In their opinion, a climate scientist was not qualified to comment on climate change: but pages that registered as political entities were!”

“As a result, this Facebook page essentially froze, and most of the people who followed this page could no longer see its posts.“

“Now, something seems to have changed in the last few weeks - which is surprising and amazing news!”

The unsurprising news, instead, is that...

• that page that has been frozen without a decent explanation for more than seven years could be frozen again tomorrow, which wouldn’t be surprising at all

• the same could happen, in any moment, on any of the other platforms where Prof. Hayhoe publishes unique content, while as of today the last post on the only “platform” she can ever control, that is her website, is dated... 2018

• publishing unique content on any unaccountable walled garden that may and will silence you whenever they feel like it will always be the opposite of “effective communication”

What to do instead

The really effective...Nah, scratch that: the only sensible strategy that every online publisher should practice, and every follower should demand by whoever they want to follow is and remains POSSE:

1. Publish Once on your own website, and only then...

2. Syndicate what you published Elsewhere, on as many platforms you want, but...

3. always including the link to your original post (even if that means the abusive, unbelievably idiotic practice known as “links in the first comment”), in order to give your followers a way to read and comment without being subject to profiling and censorship

4. shout from the rooftops the URL of your RSS feed, instead of qualifying for the RSS Hall of Constructive Shame

By happy coincidence, I posted just this week a short, simple explanation of why RSS is THE way to share and get news. Read it to know why you should abandon social media now and get news only through RSS. The only exception to that rule would be the only other technology that is just as really advanced as RSS... because it’s non-proprietary. Yes, I’m talking of email.

Email? Sure. Blogs by email, that is

Another way Prof. Hayhoe proves that I’m right is her final invitation to follow her through email:

“if you’d like to algorithm-proof your content, follow me on Substack and you will always get my weekly posts directly into your inbox.”

The only thing to change in that sentence, because it’s really important, is to replace “follow me on Substack” with “follow my blog“. Calling a blog hosted on Substack “a Substack” is like saying “I wrote a Bic pen” instead of “I wrote a letter”: it’s really, really wrong. Substacks are hosted blogs syndicated by email, period.

In case you’re concerned about the “Substack promotes Nazis” thing:

• boycotting or shaming people simply because (like me!) they where forced to temporarily (1) host their blogs on Substack is really shortsighted. I already explained why here and here

• in my experience, by far the biggest, if not the only way in which Nazis can get money and exposure on Substack is if you use Substack in the wrong way, that is through the app

• if everybody used Substack blogs properly as I do, that is: if everybody read Substack posts via email, and only used comments to those posts or search engines to find more interesting Substack-based blogs, Nazis could publish all they want here, and their only way to be seen would be handing leaflets door to door

  Non-paywalled popularization like this pays my bills. Thanks for supporting this effort via paid subscriptions, or any other means.

1: about my blog, which will outlive Substack

My blog, the Stop!, contains more than one million words of popularization of digital issues like this, without any paywall or user tracking. It’s been always online since 2007 and will remain online, completely readable, long after the disappearance of Substack, Facebook and anything like that.

Above all, the Stop! will contain everything I first published here on Substack, because that has been my plan since my first day here: write and keep every post in Markdown format on my own computer, so that I can move them all to the Stop! in any moment, automatically. Every Substack writer should do this.

Last but not least... popularization without paywalls like this is how I pay part of my bills, and I’d really like to do more, but doing it more regularly takes a lot of time. Please check out my archive and these endorsements to know why you may want to make a paid subscription to this blog or, even better, support my work in any of these other ways. Thanks!