Nintil - [Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple.

RSS is a civilized way of following updates from disparate sites you like, aggregating them in one central place that's separate from the mailbox where they can be saved to be read later, organized by source if need be. Newsletters —stuff that hits your inbox— strike me as barbaric.

The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.

My rough rule is that I’d like to write stuff that will still be worth reading in five years, and ideally stuff that will be more relevant a year from now. Because of the way news site algorithms currently work, that’s the opposite of what everybody who writes for a living does.

Top substack writers all have a clear focus. The Dispatch writes about politics, Matt Stoller writes about monopolies, Bill Bishop covers China.

It’s better for authors to think persistently and write occasionally than the other way around.

If this all sounds overly theoretical and not at all applicable to your lived experience, then fine. But how often have you gone back to read an old edition of your favorite newsletter? Why bother when you’ll have a new one tomorrow?

The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.

The difference is that status on Twiter comes from who follows, likes and retweets you, not just how many of them there are