[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible prici... See more

In contrast, every single edition of a newsletter is delivered to every single reader, and since a lot of it is paywalled, there’s little potential virality.

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.

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

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

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

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

Even if the author and readers are interesting people in isolation, aggregation forces this blob of individuals into a milquetoast morass.

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.

Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.