Comment by komali2
8 hours ago
> Switching over to a Substack newsletter, in the summer of 2023, revived my interest in writing online. It felt like rejoining an intellectual community — not quite the same as the golden age of blogging in the 2000s, but something equally as lively, in a way that I don’t think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.
This makes me sad because I really want to be a part of such a community, but I really don't like how bloated and centralized Substack is, and how much control they take away. Seems that's a requirement for community formation these days though?
That's the harsh reality, first (anecdotally / personal view) it became social media that linked to blog posts - especially Twitter was used as an aggregator for "I wrote a blog post about xyz".
Then Medium took off, and there was a vibe of blog posts being more authoritative if they were published on Medium. It was like the TED talks of blog posts. But also it mean that if you had a blog of your own and its contents were reposted on Medium, the latter would get more views.
I don't have the full picture of the whole issue. I suspect consumers generally want a single website to read stuff on, instead of the sometimes jarring style differences between blog sites - even if that means they have individual personality.
> even if that means they have individual personality
Sadly I think that’s true. People like consistency. Lets them more easily trust. It’s what makes Starbucks and McDonalds so popular even if they aren’t the best options in their category.
I think Medium succeeded at first because it allowed minimal personalization while still signaling to users “this is a legitimate article and not some rando on the web”.
I think this might be a you problem because both Medium and Substack allowed randoms on the Internet to post from day 1. There aren't any requirements, anyone can do it.
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From my point of view, the advantage of those blog platforms is that I don't have to build and maintain my own set of bookmarks. I'm happy to delegate that to the recommendation system.
The main thing is that no one wants the hassle of keeping up with 50 mildly-interesting blogs by visiting them regularly. You really need a "push" mechanism of some sort. Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.
Many other social venues are gone too. If you're lucky, you can reach your audience on HN, but it's about the only remaining, successful aggregator of this type. Reddit has grown a lot more insular and many subreddits don't allow outgoing links. Where else do you go?
In this reality, the most practical push mechanism is email, but sending email to thousands of recipients is hard. You pretty much need to pay someone for the privilege if you want to have a reasonable success rate. Substack will do it for you for free, and it also lowers the friction because it gives visitors a familiar UI with a pre-filled address and no concern about phishing / spam / etc.
Beyond that, I don't think Substack is actually that much of a community. They built a good brand by attracting (buying) a bunch of high profile writers, then had an issue with neo-Nazis where they took controversial stances... I don't associate the domain with anything especially good or bad, not different from blogspot.com or wordpress.com. I have a special hatred for medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively paywalled, but that's another story.
And yeah yeah, RSS, but the friction for RSS is much higher.
> Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.
That's an X/Twitter/Facebook problem, not a social media problem. If you're on Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
> Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
Alone... look, I want Mastodon to be successful, but revealed preferences don't lie. Mastodon MAU is about 0.1% that of Twitter, down more than 60% from the peak.
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