[Guest post] How Substack Became Milquetoast

The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.

In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple.

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.

Except that structural forces also ensure a homogeneity across newsletters, ensuring that you never read anything too original.

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

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

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.

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

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