[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

One trouble with blogging is that people subscribe to the blog , rather than each post finding its own audience. This encourages lowest common denominator writing. In particular it creates a context in which depth is penalized

This is all very good news, for writers and for readers. Filtering news and adding useful commentary is a nontrivial task, it’s hard to scale, and scaling it in one domain doesn’t imply skill in doing it somewhere else (if I switched places with someone who wrote a sports newsletter, we’d both lose all our readers). But the subscription newsletter ... See more

Are you reading the words of your favorite writer, their intern, or their intern’s ghostwriter?

At scale, I suppose performative thought isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.

As Emily Sundberg deftly noted: “Substack is making everyone into writers the way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference ... the point of Substack is ... See more