[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

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

But on Substack, you’re paid monthly, creating pressure to churn out regular updates. Since it’s impossible to have interesting novel thoughts twice a week every week, this also means writers skew heavily towards summarizing the news, pumping out quick ta... See more

Subcultures allow for an escape from status as a zero-sum game. If you’re the king of your own world, you don’t feel bad for being at the bottom of someone else’s social ladder (1, 2). Bloggers know they aren’t universally popular, but it doesn’t matter as long as you have your corner of the internet.

In contrast, Substack totally violates Social Fo... See more

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. The incentive in these situations is to ramp up variance and do the most interesting writing you... See more

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.

Nintil is not written for an audience I carefully cultivate. If you like Nintil you are free enjoy it (no paywalls here) and if you don't you can read something else. Because of that, I don't have a pressure to keep writing blogposts all the time, or feel the urge to squeeze a post out of the random daily occurrence just to be able to push the dail... See more

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. We solved the problem of centralization of consumption of diverse ... See more

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?

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.