Substack’s Ideology

If Substack’s app becomes a place readers turn to directly and are more likely to engage with, it becomes that much more valuable of a place to be for writers. In the same way we turned to email to escape the noise of Facebook and Twitter, readers of the future might turn to the Substack app to escape the noise of email. This is the nature of thing... See more

Advertising. It rewards publishers for merely attracting attention, rather than creating things people genuinely value. When this is the dominant model for funding media, the media becomes dominated by sensationalism, frivolities, conspiracies, and tribalism.

This might seem pretty small and trivial of a thing to base a network effect on, but it might work. Substack has said readers are 2.5x more likely to become a paying subscriber to one Substack newsletter if they’re already a paying subscriber to another.

By launching reading apps for web and mobile, Substack is attempting to carve out a space in readers lives that is separate from administrivia and spam. A quieter, more sacred space. 

Subscriptions. As Chris likes to say, people will ‘hate read’ things, but they won’t ‘hate pay’. When readers are asked to pay for content, they make their consumption decisions more consciously, as their better selves.

How will Substack get around their stated promise to never develop algorithmic content recommendation engines, while still helping their writers reach new audiences? Well, if you open the Substack app, you are greeted by a “Discover” tab which recommends publications rather than posts. (Nice one!) It is unclear what algorith-ahem, method—is used to... See more

What happens when readers subscribe to too many Substacks? What happens when the Substacks they subscribe to feel stale? The pressure is there and inevitable to create systems that sort, filter, and promote content...  In reality, I don’t think people actually want “full control” over what they read, because that’s too much work. What people a... See more

A year later Chris published a post about his love-hate relationship with Twitter, which took the ideology a step further:

There are two central evils within the Substack ideology:

“Twitter makes money from your attention, so they need to compel your attention. Sometimes that leads to good things, like connecting you to people and ideas that matter. But it also means that the addiction, abuse, and outrage that thrive on Twitter and other social platforms may be impossible to eradicate. So what’s left to do? You can change the... See more