Engagement algorithms. All the algorithms see are engagement metrics, they don’t care what they put in front of our faces. But what we read matters, and the most viral content is not the most valuable. Virality favors emotions like outrage, so it manufactures it from nothing if necessary, and we become addicted.Correspondingly, each evil has an... See more

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 strategy, it was a political philosophy.

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... See more

“We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free. We believe that what you read matters. And we believe that there has never been a better time to bolster and protect those ideals. Now, more than ever, publishers of news and similar content can be profitable through direct payments from... See more

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

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.

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.

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.

Right now when people read a Substack post, it’s usually because they first decided to check their email. Email is good for maintaining a direct relationship between readers and writers, but it kinda sucks as a place to read. When I’m checking my inbox I’m in a mode where I want to bat away everything as quickly as possible in order to get to inbox... See more