I have over 200k “followers” yet my paid subscriptions have fallen off a cliff.

I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on with the platform economics of Substack. In the past 6 months my paid subscriptions have plummeted, despite me making no changes to my content, yet my “followers” are skyrocketing.

Is anyone else experiencing this? It makes me skeptical of Substack as a platform, because it feels more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed. I wish I could turn off the ability of anyone to “follow” me. Because what good are followers when follower growth seems correlated with losing paid subs??