[Week 21] The problem with most newsletters (including Substacks)

What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing--or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept--and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of “thinking through,” to which subscribers are ... See more

Substack hasn’t just made me a subscriber; it’s turned me into a willing participant in the marketplace of internet intellectualism.

That’s the platform’s real magic trick—turning ideas into products, writers into entrepreneurs, and newsletters into status symbols.

The problem for blogs was always search, audience capture, monetization, and the impulse to blather about nothing. I think the transition of essays out of blogs and into newsletters effectively solved these problems, since now the incentives incline more toward quality rather than quantity.