Extra! Extra! Substack Plagued by Phd Plagiarizer Pandemonium!

It appears, the girls are fighting

Recently, and for the first time ever, I found myself scrolling Substack’s notes feature on the hunt for more information. What was everyone talking about? They all seemed to be mad at someone for something, but who? and what? There were references to multiple instances of plagiarism and beautiful women who were both perpetrators and victims. All of it substack-based. I had to get to the bottom of it.

Here’s what happened

With increasingly less irony, users have been obsessed with the Substack leaderboard. It’s a list of the top 100 Substacks in a given category, determined not by total subscribers but by a mystery metric that results in “rising”. It’s the gold star that all these people (all of us?) are looking for. To be #1 in rising popularity? Who wouldn’t want that? Especially when you don’t have to be the best, the algorithm just has to decide that your work is promising. You’re gaining traction, and it’s noteworthy. It’s also not clear how this happens. You are blessed with a place on this leaderboard. It is a seemingly random gift from God. People talk about it, they post about it, we all know it’s there. It offers legitimacy, especially to someone who is not otherwise famous. Once you remove legacy media, brands, and people who were already famous, to be “rising” is to be a made man on Substack. We are all still looking for a checkmark to prove we’re worth listening to.

Recently, the #1 in “New Bestsellers” was the blog learning-loving meaning-making written by a woman named Maalvika. Promptly after her accession, Katie Jgln from Noosphere, came forward with an accusation of plagiarism. This was not the misattribution form of plagiarism but the wholesale taking of someone else’s work and passing it off as one’s own. A whole article, multiple whole articles, from many people, copied and pasted in the Substack text editor and published, passed off as Maalvika’s ideas. All behind a paywall and all to promote her TikTok.

The people were all on Katie’s side, and some even came to discover that they had also been plagiarized. Scandal was rocking Substack, and everyone left their post as amateur cultural critic to discuss this or got out their pitchforks and took to Notes. It was fun to watch in the same way it’s fun to read a terse email exchange between two coworkers who don’t work in your department. It’s not great drama, but it is some drama, which is more than we were getting before.