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.

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.

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

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.

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... See more

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.

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.