One Year at Substack

How it has gone

My first post at Substack was made one year ago today. This is post 434, so the posting pace has been a little over one a day. I may not be able to keep up this rate. I am summarizing posts on various themes, in preparation for updating my pinned post, which will be a kind of index of my Substack site.

I would not have joined Substack unless I could immediately ban trolls. Trolls came swarming wherever I appeared on the Internet in 2006-2007 (and I had my own stalker), after a several year hiatus, and I did not engage the public again until Bill Ryan started a troll-free forum a few years later, to my eternal gratitude. Fortunately, I have only had to ban about one person a month (and catfishers) at Substack. My banning ability is surely what kept my Substack fairly peaceful, as most trolls won’t even try, knowing its futility. I have been surprised by some authors and other famous people (having a Wikipedia bio might be the threshold of that) who follow me or have contacted me. I don’t know if anything will come of that. Readers come and go, and I have a little over 1,000 subscribers and followers today.

This week, I did my first interview since 2011, and it went well. I plan to do more. But my work is really all about building that choir, and a few candidates have arrived. That interview touched on another path that I have thought could work, and is really what I had hoped to accomplish during my days with Dennis Lee. If his heat pump was revived in the USA with a non-profit effort, and the “profits” went into a fund to develop free-energy technology, that could work, if the people could be found for it. I plan to post soon on what resurrecting that technology could look like.

All in all, I can’t complain, and I’ll see how Year Two goes.