I have to begin with bad news.
In the age of algorithms, there is no website that will save us.
I confess, when I turned to Substack in 2022, I thought it might. As a fledgling writer coming from Medium, I recognized the cues: Get out. People are leaving. The algorithms have turned.
They favor influencers. Popularity loops. A kind of performance that feels less and less human.
So I migrated.
I wrote short pieces—because short gets read, right? Bistro theatre, Sartre and the Waiter, Stoicism, indie films, a rant about a bad adaptation, too much enthusiasm about Obi Wan Kenobi. Nothing monumental. Some of it, frankly, embarrassing now.
But those pieces made me happy. And they made me a better writer.
I’m glad I had a place to sharpen my voice when hardly anyone was looking.
There still aren’t many people looking.
That’s part of what I want to write about here—not as a complaint. Truthfully, I’m grateful.
This past year—though part of me still feels stuck in 2025—I’ve been rebelling against what I think of as the validation market.
You’ve heard it called the Attention Economy. But that framing feels too neutral. Too polite.
Attention isn’t just scarce anymore—it’s distorted.
At the individual level, we feel a deficit. But at scale, there’s an overdose. A kind of cultural diabetic coma. Attention is everywhere, but it lacks focus.
It makes me think of an episode of Doctor Who—the one where David Tennant and Billie Piper go back to Coronation Day, June 2, 1953. The first mass television event. Everyone watching. Everyone focused.
An alien hiding in electrical currents uses that attention—millions of people staring at their televisions—to feed itself and escape with stolen energy.
That’s what it feels like scrolling now.
All of us staring into glowing rectangles, feeding something we don’t understand.
Reels of children reacting to other children. Pets being scolded. Endless loops of engineered reaction.
To quote Molly Jong-Fast:
“Why has everything become so stupid?”
Because stupidity scales.
That is what wins in the validation race.
It used to be: be sexy.
But sexy became saturated. Then it became frightening.
Now it’s something else—something louder, flatter, more desperate.
And I wonder—quietly, maybe foolishly—if the outcome will be a split:
The people who stay online, competing to out-stupid one another…
…and the people who drift back toward physical spaces. Bookstores. Coffee shops. Conversations.
A girl can dream.
Greg Wolford recently wrote about refusal to engage with Substack Notes—the algorithmic layer that pushes high-engagement content outward, flattening everything into sameness.
He’s right.
Why do platforms insist on this?
Why not build systems that surface what we individually value, instead of forcing convergence?
Because sameness is profitable.
Because individuality is harder to scale.
Because, at some level, the system does not want you to be yourself—it wants you to be legible, predictable, and optimizable.
Two years ago, Mo_Diggs argued for dropping out of the validation race.
Not by leaving platforms entirely—but by disengaging from the need to be seen.
Just write.
Use Notes if you want. Post if you want. But release the expectation of attention.
Because attention-seeking has never worked—not really. Even before algorithms, people resisted it.
Now, with algorithms, it’s simply mechanized.
And yet, we can’t fully leave.
Social media has become a kind of modern calling card. In a world where emails go unanswered, you either exist on these platforms or risk becoming unreachable.
So I’ve made my compromises.
Instagram lives on my iPad, not my phone. I don’t carry it with me.
When I go out, I bring a book.
When I’m standing in line or sitting in a waiting room, I read. While others scroll, I turn pages.
It’s a small act of resistance. But it matters.
(Anthony Marigold is taking algorithm resistance to a seriously heroic level. I regard his Magazine Non Grata as a small ember—steady, alive—in a very dark tunnel.)
I don’t think leaving Substack is the answer either.
New platforms will emerge. They always do. And eventually, the same forces will find them.
It’s not a platform problem. It’s a system problem.
And I would rather spend my time writing than fighting a system I cannot win against.
I’ve been thinking about this constantly—especially since I paid for a press release for The Signal Between Us.
Now the emails come daily.
Marketing consultants. Visibility strategists. Growth experts. Companies like Signal Clarity offering their formulas.
All promising the same thing: attention.
As if attention can be purchased in meaningful quantities.
As if you can spend your way into being read.
My book is at a disadvantage in this economy.
It can’t compete with hot vampires, werewolves, and erotica.
It’s about silence. Memory. Emotional distance. The slow, fragile work of connection.
The people who would love it aren’t being targeted by ads.
They’re not even being shown where to look.
And I don’t believe I can trick an algorithm into changing that.
Not with money. Not with strategy.
Certainly not with Amazon ads.
A book like mine travels differently.
It moves through conversation. Through recommendation. Through moments of recognition between people.
Hand to hand. Eye contact. A quiet “you might like this.”
Which is terrifying for me.
Because I live with Avoidant Personality Disorder. Social anxiety. The whole constellation.
And yet—that is exactly what this kind of work demands.
Not scrollers. Not influencers.
Readers.
So I’m trying.
This Saturday, a Goodreads giveaway goes live: one hundred Kindle copies of The Signal Between Us.
A small gesture. But a meaningful one.
Yes, Goodreads is corporate owned. Yes, it isn’t perfect. And yes, some readers are migrating to decentralized counterparts like StoryGraph.
But my thinking is simple:
If attention is going to exist somewhere, let it at least exist in spaces where people are looking for books.
Because when people find books, there’s still a chance—however small—that they might read them.
And people reading books, these days?
That’s still a bet I’m willing to make.
A girl can dream.
Ashley Rovira is the author of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story and the founder of Heavy Crown Press, where she writes about neurodivergence, fracture, and the spaces between what is felt and what is said.
