A while back, in the days before I joined Substack, I was having trouble posting enticing links to my blog posts. What’s supposed to happen, when you click on the Share to Facebook button, is that a link to this post shoots over to Facebook slicker’n snot and shows up with its associated photograph. Maybe that works when you try it, but when I try it, it shows up on Facebook with no enticing photograph at all. This is because the internet knows I’m not a confident rider and it’s looking to buck me off at every opportunity. The internet can just tell.

Every couple months it decides to post properly with the photo and all, and that’s just because the internet is fucking with me. I have done nothing different. So the internet occasionally cooperates when it senses I’m about to take my ball and go home.

What I do instead is put in a link on Facebook and add my photo manually and hope people notice it’s a blog post. And I try to add a little sumpin’ to get people to click on it.

That’s what I did the other day and I had that sucker posted for eighteen nanoseconds before Facebook ripped it off the page, leaving a dark smoking hole and a rapidly disappearing coyote, and scolded me for posting spam. Eighteen nanoseconds isn’t enough time for them to find my F-bombs or any threats, veiled or otherwise, to assassinate anyone anyone’s heard of. It’s definitely not enough time for them to surmise that, as a Democrat, I have no ability or means to assassinate, and my fervent wishes are no more substantial than my vote in a non-swing state. So I was perplexed.

They fired off their Spam rules for me, and as far as I can tell, where I went wrong was disguising a link as something like a poll, to get clicks. Well. The post in question was about how plants communicate with each other by calcium signaling. Which, put that way, is not enticing to a large swath of people, not that I know why. So instead, I put in my photograph and typed: “Plants talk to each other behind your back. What are they saying about you?”

BAM. Poof! Smoking black hole.

It’s particularly galling because the associated photograph had a speech bubble in it and I had to fart around in Editing for, like, an hour (see “not a confident rider,” above) to figure out how to do it. I was kinda proud of it.

Well, I’ve seen clickbait before. You’ll never need a boner pill again. Hollywood’s secret beauty hack using only duct tape and a banana. 19 things they won’t tell you in rehab. 30 unbelievable objects doctors have removed from back fat folds. You won’t believe #24!

In my own example, I should have put in an undoctored photo of a plant without showing any of its sexual parts and the tag line: Botanists study plants. It doesn’t really matter what I write as long as it isn’t likely to make anyone click on the link.

That’s the goal.