Substack Isn't The Enemy Here

"Substack is selling out" "Substack is bowing the the big accounts" "Substack advertising is on its way" "Substack doesn't care about the smaller writers". Is this nonsense?

With new feature releases comes a wave of different emotions.

There are some who crave for things to stand still, there are those excited for the new shiny object and there are those who see an underlying agenda.

Of course, we all sit in each each of these three camps at different times and in different situations. The thing we need to remember here is that this fantastic place called Substack is pretty new. We’re living in a building site. It’s constantly changing. What appears to upset us is when we see decisions being made that appear to go against the founding principles of the platform.

If you’re someone who’s been one of the first to move into a new housing estate then you’ll probably know how everyone is feeling as Substack builds around them.

Lets take those people who were first to move in.

It was exciting. A fresh start in a new place. Everyone around you was here for the same reason and had become tired with their old life over in the centre of town where everyone had become transactional and cynical. It was grey there. Polluted. People were craving a new start. You’d had enough. It was time to move on.

Substack was the new start.

So you moved on and it was great in Substack Town. The sun shone, the hills were green and the future felt simpler and more pure.

But things started to change.

As new houses were built around you, more people move in. New people. Different people. People who are also looking for a new start but may not appreciate the vibe that had been there in those early formative days.

The Elite Capture of Substack post by

Cydney Hayes

summarised these worries and is brilliantly written but I disagree with a lot of it. Let’s take a deeper look.

Substack is becoming a “greedy feedy” social media platform

Was Notes a play at grabbing some of the Twitter users? Maybe. And the response from Mr Musk to remove Substack links from their approved list was evidence of the war that was always brewing under the surface.

Regardless of the Twitter play, Substack notes offers a different discovery platform based primarily around who you subscribe to and recommendations of those people you subscribe to.

I don’t feel a the pull of an algorithm here. At least not yet.

Is the addition of followers bowing down to the social media pull of the world? I don’t think so.

I see this as a “subscriber light” option that doesn’t require me to commit to having emails flooding into my inbox. I admit to being one of those people who subscribed to a lot of Substacks in the early days of being here. In fact, I subscribed to so many that it seemed all my inbox contained was Substack newsletters. I even missed an email from my bank that was lost amid this inundation!

Becoming a “follower” has allowed my to keep track of other writers without that commitment of a regular email. Maybe I will even consider subscribing later once I’ve got to know them better.

I see followers as a neat gateway and Notes as a different discovery platform where we can converse with other writers. It’s still a nice place to hang out.

Verdict: At the moment were ok but keep a close eye on how it develops.

Notes is driving users to focus on shorter, more frequent posts

Notes feels like a nice community of writers.

Yes, the content of a Note is often short but most of these are either advertising newsletter posts or starting a discussion. I don’t see the evidence of this leading to shorter newsletter posts.