This real estate blogger does not exist
Subscription-oriented blogging platforms such as Substack are not immune to spam
Meet Alexa Grace Kern, author of the reasonably popular real estate blog “Realtors @ Substack”, which boasts over 55,000 subscribers as of May 2nd, 2024. All is not as it seems, however, as Alexa Grace Kern’s profile photo is a StyleGAN-generated face, and DuckDuckGo and Google searches for the name “Alexa Grace Kern” turn up no evidence that anyone by this name exists, outside of material linking back to the blog in question. Additional problems turn up as one digs deeper: the blog’s subscriber numbers have fluctuated wildly up and down in recent months, multiple posts contain plagiarized content, and the author’s name has been changed on multiple occasions.
The “Realtors @ Substack” blog (located at realteur.substack.com) has been archived by Wayback Machine on multiple occasions over the course of 2023 and 2024, providing a look into the blog’s history. It turns out that the author didn’t always use the name “Alexa Grace Kern”; in early 2023, the blog was allegedly written by “Zilla Mckenzie”, and by the end of March 2023, the author’s name had been changed to “Norman Something”, before finally adopting the “Alexa Grace Kern” moniker no later than February 8th, 2024. Although Substack blogs can have multiple authors, we can tell that these are all the same author account because the permanent ID number, 45882377, remains the same even as the account’s display name changes.
Artifacts of these name changes linger in some of the posts, as the author of the “Realtors @ Substack” blog has a habit of signing most of their posts with their then-current account name. Thus, the oldest visible post, which claims in its text to be written by “Norman”, presently shows the GAN-faced “Alexa Grace Kern” on the byline. In this post, the author claims to be affiliated with the website Agently.com, providing a possible clue as to the goal of this particular blog.
As it turns out, the “Realtors @ Substack” blog is full of links to Agently.com, and many of the posts promote the site’s services. This is particularly true of a recent flurry of posts regarding a lawsuit involving the National Association of Realtors; almost every post on this topic either begins or ends with a paragraph advertising Agently.com. It is reasonable to hypothesize that driving traffic to the Agently website is in fact the primary purpose of the “Realtors @ Substack” blog.
At least some of the content of the “Realtors @ Substack” blog is plagiarized from elsewhere on the Internet. For example, most of a September 2021 post with the title “Tattoo Thinking” is lifted almost word for word from an August 2012 post on a site called “Seth’s Blog”. The plagiarized version changes a couple of sentences and breaks the post into a larger number of paragraphs, but most of the content is identical. As with the oldest presently visible post, this post is signed “Norman” but presently shows the name “Alexa Grace Kern” on the byline.
In another case, the “Realtors @ Substack” blog copied a block of text that had already been posted repeatedly to Facebook by multiple accounts. A September 2022 post titled “Close more deals in this shifting market” contains several sentences that were previously posted verbatim on multiple real estate-themed Facebook pages. This text also turns up on other social media sites including Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, both before and after the Substack post.
In a final interesting twist, the “Realtors @ Substack” blog’s subscriber count has been fluctuating dramatically thus far in 2024, after holding steady at around 26,000 subscribers throughout most of 2023. The blog’s readership skyrocketed to 68,000 subscribers by early February 2024, only to drop back down to 45,000 by early April, and bounce back somewhat to 55,000 as of May 2nd. (Subscriber counts were obtained from Wayback Machine captures.) Most of the posts get negligible engagement, and there are very few links to this blog on other websites, so it is plausible that the subscriber count for this blog is being inflated somehow, and that the recent drop of 23,000 subscribers was the result of some sort of anti-spam action by Substack. Other possible explanations exist as well.
I met these guys at Inman Conference in Vegas. I don't get your Substack publication, I thought Substack is supposed to be fun. Your posts should be flagged as hateful content. Please get a life.