[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

Organic sharing, growth and virality exposes readers to a wide variety of authors, serving up the best of each one’s writing. On Substack, instead of getting the best 1% of posts from 100 authors, you get 100% from each one.

Isn’t this normal? After all, no writer can be expected to cover every topic. In an age of disaggregation, we should read from experts instead of casual polymaths.

having someone who is not your spouse feed their thoughts to you 5-days-a-week, thoughts that they themselves have only had a day to work on, thoughts which would likely go refined or unexpressed in a publication with longer-time horizons, is probably not good for your brain.

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.

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.

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.

In financial terms, blog posts have asymmetric returns with capped downside but unlimited upside. If you write a bad post it won’t get shared and no one will see it. If you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you’re a genius. Since content is shared organically, your best work gets way more exposure than your worst... See more

Except that structural forces also ensure a homogeneity across newsletters, ensuring that you never read anything too original.

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.

One argument for newsletters is that it allows senders to track metrics about who reads their work, how much they read, etc. In Nintil for example while I have some Google Analytics metrics, I have zero information if you read it via RSS and not open the page