[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

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

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

Homogeneity of style: A Substack newsletter can have an About page, but that’s it. There will never be anything like Nadia’s notes which are a regularly updated half-baked stream of consciousness, or Guzey’s list of Tweets or even Nintil’s categories.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.