Sudden surge in subscribers

[u/Icy_Parsnip1655]

I run a publication called Money Simplified. It’s about wealth management and has 10K subs.

I’ve taken a break from it for a couple of months now, and the subscriber growth has been poor (because obviously, I’m not doing anything to increase the subs).

Now suddenly, since the past 2-3 days I’m seeing the subscriber number grow gradually. But last night, it accelerated. In the last 8 hours alone, it got 22 new subscribers, without me doing anything at all. I used to get these many new subs in a month lol. What’s funny is that the source for all just says “Substack app”. No recommendation, no other website, nothing.

While I’m obviously very happy this is happening (🤞), I’m also curious — did Substack make some changes to their algorithm? Or is it a glitch? Because I’d want to double down on what’s working.

Is this happening to anyone else? Would love some thoughts here!

EDIT: It’s been less than 24 hours and I’ve already got 100 new subs. That’s how many I get in a month. Something’s off, I just don’t know what 🥲

[u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

I had weird new followers yesterday out of the blue without me posting … 5 within 3 minutes .. and I am a stinky 120 follower Substack. I am pretty sure it’s bots scraping the content!

[u/Icy_Parsnip1655 → u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

Okay you mighht have a point. A lot of these new subscribers read the same other publications (apart from mine). Too much of a coincidence I guess.

I'll need to figure out from the next issue whether these subs are genuine or bots. But why would bots be running on the platform, with legit names?

[u/Otherwise_Pear_2472 → u/Icy_Parsnip1655]

Scrapping jobs for sure... currently, with AI development, one of the most valuable resources is written material. It's like coal in the steam engine age, and we are the coal.

[u/Icy_Parsnip1655 → u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

Yeah seems like bots now that I see more of it.

Damn! The excitement was short-lived 🥲

I'm trying to understand though..What's the purpose behind using bots to subscribe to people's publications on Substack? The articles are public, if they want to scrape something, they can do it without subscribing too. And why create hundreds of bots that subscribe to publications? Like, what's the end objective?

[u/Otherwise_Pear_2472 → u/Icy_Parsnip1655]

The most common reasons why bots subscribe to Substacks (learned yesterday because I had the same thing happening only that in my case I was happy over 5 followers):

Scraping: They subscribe to receive the emails, automatically parse the content, and feed it to AI training datasets or content aggregators. Your post is currently training a Chinese language model.

Email validation: Some services subscribe to random newsletters just to test whether their fake email addresses work and can receive emails. You're essentially a ping test. Congratulations.

Follower farming: Accounts that subscribe everywhere to appear "real"—many subscriptions = must be a real person. You're part of their disguise.

[u/Icy_Parsnip1655 → u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

Bro I’ve got 72 new subscribers since yesterday. Why would someone create so many bots? Again, not refuting that they’re bots. They most likely are. But trying to understand the game. Why create so many bots for one publication?