Number go up: my unearned 1000-subscriber milestone

Recently my subscriber count gained a fourth base-10 digit.

One thousand subscribers! It’s gratifying validation for all the occasional work I put into this blog. If you want to follow my path to Substack success, here is what I recommend:

1. Have the same name, or at least a very similar name, as a famous person who is also on Substack. In my case, this is American humour writer Dave Barry; if you’re called something different, then you’ll need your own celebrity namesake.

2. Wait until Substack starts recommending you to people who join Substack to subscribe to the celebrity with your name. Some of these users will be confused and think they need to click on your name to subscribe to the celebrity.

3. You might have to write some posts.

For a while I thought that the third step was optional: I lose subscribers with every email I send out,1 so plausibly the best way to build an audience is to say nothing (Gwern). I might be back under 1000 by the time you read this. But recently I went six weeks without any new content, and the rate of new subscribers started to drop off. Coincidence? I don’t know, but I’d err on the side of posting.

It took me a while to realise where all my new readers were coming from. The strange behaviour started on 28 May 2025 with my follower count, rather than the subscriber count. It wasn’t subtle.

I hadn’t posted anything for several weeks, and wouldn’t post again for a couple of months, but for a while I was getting a hundred new followers a day. I still had email notifications on for these events. My first thought was a network of spam bots, hoping for follow-backs before they showed me ads for counterfeit Ray-Ban sunglasses.

But my new followers’ profiles tended to be remarkably bland, resolutely non-spammy, and generally quite similar in nature: retired teachers, retired nurses, retired electricians, etc. So my next thought was that the profiles were all fake, created by Substack itself in a deceitful attempt to encourage me to write more on their platform for my allegedly large audience. I did not for a moment consider the possibility that all these retirees represented real people.

My subscriber count started to tick up a little, quite irregularly, with a big burst starting in December 2025.

By the time I discovered Substack’s audience statistics page in its writer dashboard, I had enough subscribers that its ‘audience overlap’ table explained what had been going on. Here is what it looks like as I draft this post:

More than half of my subscribers also subscribe to the other Dave Barry! I have so many retired followers because Dave Barry is now 78-and-three-quarter years old, and his core readership is aging with him, one year every year.

Of the other audience overlaps, The Borowitz Report makes sense. But who knew that so many Dave Barry fans support Pete Buttigieg? Perhaps someone should alert Nate Silver.

Another page in my dashboard allows me to see the source of my subscribers. Since November, about 73% have come from the ‘onboarding’ category: “These users subscribed to your Substack via the algorithmic recommendations they received when they first joined the platform.”

So what’s happening is:

• People join Substack to subscribe to Dave Barry.2

• Substack tells them, “Hey, maybe you’d also like to read David Barry”.

• Some of them click to subscribe to me, thinking that they need to click to subscribe to Dave Barry, who they’re already subscribed to.

• Most of them don’t unsubscribe from me when they get an email with Fourier transforms instead of a Valentine’s-Day-themed toilet brush.

The unsubscribe link is down at the end of the email, after all my equations and graphs, which probably made you stop reading long before you scrolled that far (Gmail helpfully gives a prominent unsubscribe link near the top of the page when you open it).

Of course some people do unsubscribe. One person even blocked me after leaving a polite and well-written comment on one of my posts. Fair! It was clear she thought I was the other guy; she won’t let me fool her again. But most people have been sticking around.

It’s not the audience I had intended to cultivate, but I can’t help but like the numbers going up anyway. I remember when I considered 10 views on a post to be satisfactory – one of my film review collections only had 6 for a long while – and the dopamine hit is better at a thousand.

My favourite posts from the before-times of this blog, none of which will interest most of you, are:

• ‘Dave Gorman on perfect numbers’, my analysis of a standup comedy routine about perfect numbers, with a slightly self-parodic footnote that I may one day be embarrassed by, but which I nevertheless still get a kick out of;

• ‘I have opinions about the nine definitions of a sample quantile’, my opinions about the nine sample quantile definitions offered by the type argument of R’s quantile function; and

• ‘Searching Greek manuscripts for sieves of Eratosthenes’, which contains a collection of sieves of Eratosthenes as they appear in digitised manuscripts of Nicomachus’s Introduction to Arithmetic.

I may not write much on here in the near future. I’m thinking about writing a history of chess and its administration in Western Australia, and hours that could be spent turning my Substack stub-draft ideas into essays are instead being spent with microfilm and archives at the State Library. They have handwritten chess association meeting minutes from 1958! I haven’t written a word of this possible e(?)-book(?) yet – I’m just gathering source material for now – but it promises to be quite boring and of interest to about five people.