[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

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.

I said earlier that the biggest risk to Substack is archives, but that’s only true in the existential sense. With regards to future growth, the biggest risk is that the mainstream population continues to read mainstream journals, and Substack never crosses the chasm.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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 takes, or riffing on whatever they read on Twitter.