I love that people are writing on Substack, because it is almost a return to what blogging originally was: openly sharing connected and linked learning and insight with the world.
A couple of things frustrate me about Substack though and these are things that really distinguish it from a proper blog:
1. It's really hard to comment. In order to comment on a Substack post, I have to be a subscriber to a person's substack and I have to log in to do it. That is a bit too much work for me. When I read an interesting post and I want to contribute in the discussion, that extra step of subscribing is sometimes a bridge too far. I have dozens of unpublished comments sitting in various authors' comment boxes. Blogs, like this one, may ask you to identify yourself – which helps with spam – but you don't have to do anything else. I moderate comments here with Akismet, a plug in that rejects spam, and personal moderation. But I love the conversation here, when it happens.
2. Substack is its own ecosystem. While some social media sites are walled gardens inside of which content is protected and locked away (hello LinkedIn and Facebook and whatever is left of Twitter), Substack is at least a fenced garden. We can look through the fence at the content, which means it's more public than other places, but your content still lives inside its own wrapper. At least with Substack you can export your content in a way that it can live inside an actual blog but in practice, the website is still an algorithm-driven collection of personal pages, very much like Facebook. If your reading of online writing happens WITHIN substack mostly, you are getting served stuff based on algorithms.
3. The site encourages monetization rather than sharing. Of course you can make everything on your Substack free, but most writers I have read have at least some of their posts locked behind a paywall. I have no problem with that, and I believe that writers should be paid for their work. Substack is a publishing platform that allows people to be compensated for their work. BUT, I cannot keep adding subscriptions not my life at the rate in which I encounter invitations to do so. Blogging, traditionally speaking, is about sharing. It is about an open offering of ideas and conversation to the world, and it encourages connection and mutuality. Again, writing for money is fine. But I do find myself lamenting what I will never be able to read.
4. We might never find it again. This one applies to everywhere people write. Yes, search is broken, but at least tools like Kagi make it possible to find material that is otherwise hidden by the big "search" engines. If you are publishing on Facebook, LInkedIn or Substack only it's really hard to find your stuff! And, especially with the first two, there is no real archive of material. Furthermore, as my experience with Twitter demonstrated, some racist might come along and buy the site and change it for his own purposes, or delete it altogether and then everything would be lost. If you can AT LEAST republish your writing on an open platform that you control – like WordPress – then it will always be yours.
So this is a little cranky. But I found myself reading some substacks this morning that compelled me to respond to what was written. And I found my responses stymied by the subscription model, but my response too tribal to post here. Maybe I should just start using Mastodon for these kinds of replies. Being out there and unseen is maybe better than not ever existing in the first place!
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I’ve viscerally disliked Substack since I first found out about its existence (I’m thinking roughly 2017). This was long before I started hearing about the “Nazi bar” stuff. Basically a blogger I liked started a substack, and of course from that point forward the blog existed solely to promote the substack, at which point of course I unsubscribed (i.e. dropped it from my list of subcribed RSS feeds).
Nowadays I don’t even bother using a feed reader. The blogosphere is DEAD. Maybe the so-called pivot to video killed it. That’s part of it, but another part is DIY ethos being replaced by FYPM ethos. This has happened gradually over the years, but I think the recession that started in 2008 really kicked it into high gear. “Don’t quit your day job” used to be widely understood by creative types to be part of the underlying social contract. Now, of course, your work, including strictly amateur work, will be exploited (monetized) whether you consent to that or not, so there’s a sense that you’re some kind of a scab if you’re willing to do anything for free. And there’s that more compelling question: WHAT day job?
Protocols and platforms (or more generally, open source and proprietary implementations of anything) are like oil and water. Those who wish to monetize their online presence will gravitate to “built for monetization” platforms such as TikTok and Instagram (or Substack for those whose metier is the written word). They will rage quit platforms built for nickel-and-diming creators (such as YouTube, where “I can’t do this anymore” videos are now even more cliche than ALL CAPS video titles). Any open protocol such as the Fediverse or the blogosphere (basically RSS) will be used, if at all, strictly for promoting content drops on monetized platforms.
I so appreciate you. I just started charging for the first time ever for a series on my Substack. I have mixed feelings about it partially for the same reasons you’re bringing up. thank you for helping me think about it more.
No shame in it! 🙂