Substack Blog

It seems to me that once you are an established writer you can go to substack and get something worthwhile out of it, but otherwise - let's read this suggestion on how to grow your audience

https://on.substack.com/p/getting-your-first-100-signups

I guess this is useful if there is no difference between your professional and non-professional personas, then you can get a lot of people reading you from linkedIn that are your professional connections and interested in what you write because you write about your professional interests.

Or if you are a naturally convivial person who has done nothing but expanded their supply of friends from high school on.

Or who has the free time to go to social events and socialize.

I'm writing on Medium https://medium.com/luminasticity because it seems to have an understandable way of building an audience that does not require you to do much other than write (although there is a detestable social aspect to it as well), it certainly isn't going great and it has taken 3 months to build 97 followers, most days I get only 4 or 5 views with every now and then a large amount for no discernible reason (by large I tend to mean 70 views), pretty much everything I write gets less than 100 views - whether a short funny piece about how suggestions by computers tend to be useless if you are actually competent [Suggestions from Idiots](https://medium.com/p/6b023acc30ae ) to a multi-story time travel narrative https://medium.com/p/adb84f467d8a with a…

I think you're wrong (I'm ignoring the inflammatory rhetoric and taking the core of your argument in good faith).

The good thing about substack compared to most centralized apps is that writers maintain control over their audience address list. This aligns incentives since leaving is possible. It makes them more of an actual software platform for their writers which is a good thing imo. As long as this remains true, the risk is low.

It’s probably the best outcome you can realistically get on the non-urbit web outside of niche providers like ghost which have their own trade-offs.

I suspect the hardest thing for substack will be the moderation position they find themselves in. If they do anything to try to help increase readership (even if they don't) they will eventually find themselves in the same difficult situations as every other platform, this is just an unavoidable fact of being a centralized service with this power and capability (and choosing who you will not allow as customers is a form of substack's speech). Having this responsibility is not easy and with continued success and scale becomes messy.

This (imo) just isn't something that can be solved by a centralized system effectively, even though it sounds like they'll do the best the can: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation

From the Substack-related interviews/content I've consumed, it seems like the company is more concerned with tools/support [0] [1] for its creators, before it worries about consumer growth.

The idea is that once you have an excess of supply (writers), who are all bringing in their own readers, it's easier to connect the dots for readers to other publications. Whereas if your reader demand outweighs supply, people will not see any value from sticking around.

As a writer on the platform[2] itself, I think the general tools/support for the non-Top 20 creators leaves a ton to be desired, so would love to see them step it up in a number of ways if they're really trying to get behind the average writer.

[0] https://on.substack.com/p/announcing-the-next-substack-fellowship
[1]https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers
[2]https://pausebutton.substack.com/

I think an ongoing, robust RSS ecosystem is a major thorn in the side of any substack-like business model.

Their target consumer (affluent/intellectual enough to pay for access to ideas) has access to a far wider variety of arguably better content if they're willing to build up a set of RSS feeds.

Maybe there's room to build a company on top of the RSS ecosystem, but it's difficult when free, feature-rich, and high quality alternatives exist.

FWIW, it does seem like Substack is trying to attack this space: https://on.substack.com/p/new-reader-homepage.

However, as a publisher/bundler of paid RSS feeds, they have a big conflict of interest in offering an RSS reader. Like Spotify and their "exclusive" podcasts, they have an incentive to push bland content and obscure the rich niches that make the RSS ecosystem actually-valuable.

It's a tricky problem indeed, this one regarding their app, although not a surprising one. Last month, Hamish McKenzie (cofounder) wrote[1] that “the trend that Substack is part of is not a newsletter trend, or even the much-hyped creator economy”. So, an app that distance subscribers from e-mail was expected.

Btw, giving a special address would increase the lock-in, IMHO. The newsletter owner would be dependent of Substacks benevolence forever.

As I wrote, I recognize Substack as a force for good, but there are cracks in their promise and considering it's a VC-backed startup, things only tend to get worse in the long run.

[1] https://on.substack.com/p/please-stop-calling-it-the-newsletter

The article we're commenting on lists several examples of the dynamic and it aligns with my personal experience offline and online. There are also stats like these:

https://on.substack.com/p/the-substack-ai-report

"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."

I can, of course, dig up more supporting data, but that is not as important to me as making sense of what I'm actually seeing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/views-of-ais-impact-on-society-and-human-abilities/

"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."