this person does not exist, but that’s no barrier to getting 55K subscribersMeet 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.a blog by any other name would still smell like spamThe “Realtors @ Substack” blog (located at realteur.substack.com) has been archived by Wayback Machine on multiple occasions over the course of 2023 and 2024, providing a look into the blog’s history.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.TFW…This real estate blogger does not exist