Substack’s Ideology

The thing I didn’t understand going into it was that Substack wasn’t just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers thanks to the leverage technology gives them—it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The Substack model wasn’t just a business... See more

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

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

Inboxes. Instead of endless feed-scrolling, Substack only puts content in your inbox that you specifically opted-in to receive. Whether in your email inbox or in a separate Substack inbox in their reader app, you only see things you decided to see. You are in control.

The second thing Substack is doing to build power within the constraints of their ideology is to create content discovery loops that are driven by people, rather than algorithms. This is why Substack lets writers feature other writers on their sites, and gives readers profiles where they can display which Substacks they are subscribed to.

There are two central evils within the Substack ideology:

When Substack launched their reader web app last year, I thought it was interesting but faced an uphill battle. It’s really hard in today’s age of addiction to get people to habitually come to a new URL. That’s why blogs died and became reincarnated as newsletters.

This to me is the key to understanding Substack: a delicate balance between growth-driven pragmatism and ideology-driven constraint. Both motivations are present, and they’re doing their best to harmonize them, even though there is some degree of inherent, inescapable conflict.

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.