Substack isn't your savior
Social media platforms, their lifecycles, and why Substack is no different
In 2011, I kicked off a tremendously unprofitable online writing career by launching Casual Things on tumblr. To be fair, I didn’t do it for the money then, as I still don’t on Substack now, even though the quality and quantity of my writing here is much better and maybe, perhaps, perchance worthy of a paywall. I’ve always used online platforms of expression mostly as a vehicle to mess around—be that with my identity, my ideas, or some combination of both. It’s work, to be sure, but any money I’ve made doing it between 2011 and 2024—freelancing for culture and humor sites like The A.V. Club (R.I.P, basically) and Points in Case (thanks for taking what McSweeney’s wouldn’t!) as well as working full-time for digital upstarts like A Plus (actual R.I.P.) and The Odyssey Online (lol)—has always been more of a nice bonus than anything resembling a sustainable living.
It’s a good thing I only seriously relied on that money to get by for two years in the middle of my ‘20s while living in New York—back when my economic anxiety took a backseat to other forms of the stuff (social, emotional, romantic). Had I not parlayed the UX/content marketing skills I somewhat unknowingly picked up at the aforementioned digital upstarts into a content strategist role at Facebook, I hate to think how all those strands of anxiety might have coalesced into a devastating knot of dread at the core of a 12-year-plus career in media today.
Given the way the media industry has fractured and consolidated and withered over that time, it’s possible such a road could have led me exactly to where we are right now anyway—Substack. We’ll never know for sure, because that’s not the path reality took. We won’t know if I’d have joined the ranks of Substack whales like
and or modest-but-still-probably-making-a-decent-living writers like and . OR even people making almost no money off of a few hundred or less total subscribers but damnit if they aren’t trying to make the dream happen eventually anyway. What I will say is that as much as I admire how this platform has fostered a substantial network of thoughtful writers, readers, and general purveyors of culture, I’m extremely thankful I don’t depend on its monetization tools to make a living. Because as much as its founders would have you believe otherwise, this platform is no more immune to the powerful warp of monetizeable time spent online than the major internet pioneers against which Substack loves to assume a moral high ground.Substack’s mission is to build “a new economic engine for culture”, which essentially boils down to facilitating the one of two major forms of making money online that isn’t advertising: subscriptions. This laser focus on connecting publishing and audience-building tools to paid subscriptions is, as the company’s Chief Writing Officer
likes to say, completely in service to writers. Almost a year ago, in Making the internet work for writers, he wrote:“We are building a discovery system that attempts to maximize subscription revenue for writers. In this system, it’s imperative to respect writer ownership. To keep writers happy, we have to prove ourselves of service to them—not the other way around. Unlike legacy social media platforms, we’re happy when you stop scrolling and click in to read something deeply. We don’t want a closed system; we want writers to share their work across every platform, to ensure maximum exposure.”
Parts of this make sense—Substack is successful only when the writers that use its platform are happy, which is to say, making money through subscriptions. The company takes a 10 percent cut of every dollar that a reader sends to a writer through its system, so the incentives are neatly aligned. The logic goes: build tools/discovery mechanisms/vibes that enable writers to create the sort of content that people will pay for → people find content they like so much they pay for it → writers make money and are happy → Substack makes money and is happy. Everybody’s having a good time, right?
Sure. Except for the “we’re happy when you stop scrolling and click in” part. I challenge McKenzie to publish this statement honestly again if Substack’s network effects become so great one day that people outside of its system wise up to yet another firehose of traffic that can drive substantial clicks outside of the premesis. Also, wanting writers to share their work across every platform in the form of links that lead back to Substack doesn’t make your platform an open system. It promotes the casting of one-way lines across the web that run straight back into their source. Openness is a two-way street, and Substack would not be beefing up its audio and video features, improving its Twitter clone, courting TikTok creators, or generally behaving like literally every social media company that came before it if it truly had designs on being open.
This dynamic bothers me for two reasons: the first is simply because it’s disingenuous. As much good as Substack has done for writers, journalists, and other smart people caught up in the turmoil of the media industry’s ugly decline, it's ringing increasingly hollow every time the company positions itself as a savior through screeds like “Fight!”, in which McKenzie leverages the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to deliver business-aligned messaging around “taking back your mind” (on Substack) from the incentives of some ambiguous system that has “ensnared us in its addiction feeds.” This is nothing more than Substack’s own incentives masquerading as moral righteousness, and honestly I don’t doubt that the company’s founders genuinely believe their mission is a public good. Mark Zuckerberg probably very much believed in the value of connecting the whole world, and for all I know the CEO of the company I currently work for still does. What a coincidence, though, that connecting people lent itself so well to one of the most lucrative business models the world has ever seen.
The second reason this bothers me is where it all very likely leads. You don’t need to be able to see into the future to understand the later stages of a successful platform, regardless of its primary content format, regardless of whether it makes money through advertising or subscriptions.
touched on this in her own essay about Substack a few weeks ago, observing that the platform “is making everyone into writers the same way Instagram made everyone into photographers” as evidenced by the way influencers are suddenly adding “writer” to their Instagram profile bios because they’ve expanded their footprint to this locale. She writes:“Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.”
Unfortunately I now also need to quote a very good writer she quoted in her writing to underscore a point—
. (This is unfortunate because of the quote of a quote, not because of him.)“…I cringe when I hit a paywall on some random weekend update newsletter of a writer who I subscribed to because their work was interesting. Like you want me to pay for 5 links you read this week or your fav new novel?…A lot of paywalled newsletters seem like afterthoughts or not very intentionally structured. Maybe I'm biased as an Aging Millennial but I think editorial products require commitment and should be well-designed.”
Uh oh. Maybe my work actually isn’t worthy of a paywall after all, given the prevalence of throwaway link lists I’ve published alongside essays that I genuinely put a lot of thought and effort into. Oh well. I wasn’t thinking of asking for paid subscriptions anytime soon. What I’m getting at is that Substack has built a good product around which a multi-sided marketplace has formed, with a real opportunity to make money, even if the majority of those potential dollars are zoomed up by a select few. (The top 10 publishers collectively earn more than $25 million annually.) That means the opportunists will, and already do, reverse engineer the system as they see it to replicate a successful audience and monetization strategy, flattening an interesting diversity of thought into a sea of likeminded…content.
This future (and perhaps somewhat current) state is a bummer, but it’s sort of par for the course. What’s significantly worse than par is the cesspool has Twitter turned into, and what Substack actually risks turning into as well given its hands off approach to content moderation that led to an understandable flareup over a conspicuous presence of nazis on the platform earlier this year. Part of the fallout of that situation was a minor exodus from these parts, perhaps most notably by Casey Newton of Platformer. “We’ve seen this movie before — and we won’t stick around to watch it play out” was the subheader for his “why I’m leaving” post, and it basically tells you all you need to know. In any case, he also noted:
“Tech platforms come and go; in the meantime, they can also change in ways that make staying there impossible for the creators that rely on them.”
I suppose that’s why the real thing to do if you want to make it as an independent writer or creator or publication is to reduce your dependency on any one platform, even if it’s the one that purports to be expressly designed for your needs. It’s part of the narrative for why one of my favorite newsletters—Tangle—left Substack a few years ago. People who are serious about building something that lasts, on which they can support themselves and others and do meaningful work, can and will move onto the next thing when it suits them. People who aren’t serious and just looking for a quick buck will move on too. What’s left when they’re all gone? Nothing pretty.
So anyway. I guess if I could tell the Substack founders anything directly, it would be to resist the urge to climb up on a high horse during a favorable period in the cycle of their social media platform’s growth, and to admit that’s exactly what they are: a social media platform. Not a savior. Focus on building a solid product and extending the good period as long as possible, not talking about how you’re different.
And be humble. It looks better in times both good and bad.