“This week I am doing something new. I am not going to include links to my sources. This is primarily because less than.01% of links posted are ever clicked, and of those, 93.7% are links to articles by other writers I recommend. Adding the links adds over an hour to the publication process because they do not carry over when I paste the finished product from my word processor into the submission portal, and I have to go through the article and manually add them back. Please let me know your opinion on whether the links were a valuable addition or can stay as a remnant of past articles.”
I received no feedback requesting that I keep the links. In the one article since then that I included some links in, only the first link to the actual Department of Justice Epstein files was clicked, and then only by 5% of readers. Bottom line, it takes a lot of extra time to put all the links in the right spots once an article is moved to Substack, and since very few were ever used, it didn’t seem like it was worth it. That was confirmed to me when I received no feedback requesting those links be maintained.
I think this is the first time I’ve seen a column of yours without a single resource link included. Why is that?
Ah, didn’t see the previous post.
Should I take this as a request for the return of links?
As I wrote in my post of 16 January 2026
https://thoughtsfromtheasylum.substack.com/p/the-struggle-continues
“This week I am doing something new. I am not going to include links to my sources. This is primarily because less than.01% of links posted are ever clicked, and of those, 93.7% are links to articles by other writers I recommend. Adding the links adds over an hour to the publication process because they do not carry over when I paste the finished product from my word processor into the submission portal, and I have to go through the article and manually add them back. Please let me know your opinion on whether the links were a valuable addition or can stay as a remnant of past articles.”
I received no feedback requesting that I keep the links. In the one article since then that I included some links in, only the first link to the actual Department of Justice Epstein files was clicked, and then only by 5% of readers. Bottom line, it takes a lot of extra time to put all the links in the right spots once an article is moved to Substack, and since very few were ever used, it didn’t seem like it was worth it. That was confirmed to me when I received no feedback requesting those links be maintained.