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Double down on being human (No, I don't want to train your AI model)
(meandmymonsters.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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As an analog note note-taker/writer and as an analog reader too (don't underestimate how your ebook reading habits can be also be used/monetized) I can understand how you feel even though I'm not hostile to AI per se: I'm hostile to corporation/privately-owned AI, raiding human knowledge to feed itself and then poo... sell it back to us for a profit, and I'm hostile to AI being sold as the solution to everything.
If I may ask , don't you think there is a higher risk using Substack, than some website/blog you would fully control and own, to see your content being force fed to AI without yout consent? I mean, like it happened with reddit, right?
That is a good point. To be honest I just started using substack because it was the first option I thought of to create something quickly. Do you have any platform suggestions that don't require a long time to setup?
There are many good platforms to host content but you should be keep in mind any platform you rely on, no mater how good it is today, can turn around and switch policies at a whim (see how reddit changed its policies and has now become what it is).
A better approach would be to aim to own and control your own tools. That doesn’t even have to be complex, but it does require a little more setup/configuration work. Imho, that's the price to pay to keep control. What is required? To own a domain name (you will need to pay for that), to have a small web hosting space (selfhosted on a computer you own, or rented which is much simpler to do but seldom free), and some tool to help you create the actual website.
There are many creation tools. Ranging from writing HTML by hand to using tools like WordPress (the same WordPress that is being used worldwide by many pro websites), or use those little things called ‘static website generators’. Depending your background and willingness to learn new stuff the right tool will not be the same ;)
I had been using WordPress since it was first introduced in the early 00s, and before that I used to write my own pages ... by hand, but now I use a static website generator. It's called Hugo but there are many others like it. This will require some more work to set it up (not that much depending what you want to do, you can create your first website in maybe a couple hours but you may also spend weeks reading docs to get it fine tuned). The great thing is that once it's done you don't have to worry about it ever (unlike with wordpress).