What Does Substack Want from Who?

Have we enshitted?

If you’re like me and you’ve been trying to build a platform on Substack based around your writing for longer than the last year, you might’ve noticed how slow going growing your audience has gotten.

Which is kinda nuts because even two years ago it was relatively straight-forward. You wrote, and if it was somewhat decent, you’d get some subscribers. After-taxes beer money. If it was really good, you’d get a decent amount of subscribers. After-taxes emergency fund-enhancing money. And, on either end of the spectrum, if you were as comprehensive as someone like Heather Richardson or as braindead and vapid as Matt Yglesias, you’d get a ton of followers. You were writing to live, and people could find you on the merit (or lack thereof) of your words alone.

Now? HOLY fuck.

Now, building a writing-only-page on Substack without a pre-built audience primed to want to read your words can only accurately be described as a humiliation ritual.

But, I suggest, that is not the fault (alone) of the producers on here writing worse stuff on average. It is because the platform itself has, in its own unique way, become enshittified. However, you’re going to miss out on this if you think that you can map the enshittification journey from tech companies onto Substack’s fall. What killed Substack wasn’t a process like Uber and Spotify’s Ship of Theseus—wherein those platforms got in some ways stripped of features people loved and bloated with bullshit and bad service in other ways—but moreso it was its wholesale transformation from a wooden ship, if you will, into a Tesla Model 3.

It just simply does not seem like this is a platform for small-scale, long-form, new writer-excluive-creators anymore. Instead, Substack seems to want to be a mix of Twitter, Twitch, and a newswire for established media personalities.

I will attack each of these accusations separately.

It is well known at this point that, if you want to be discovered through Substack alone, you’ve got to use the Notes feature. Even on my page, out of the 7,100 subscribers I have, something like 600 of them have come from people reading my notes. Which is … fine. It was weird though: the notes for a while had a middling purpose. Like were writers supposed to treat them like TL;DRs for their newsletter? Were they supposed to supplement the long-form stuff? Well, as it turned out, neither. They were a place for quips—for Tweets!

I mean… look at the engagement on these:

Okay and mind you: I am not immune from this. I’ve posted Notes that were basically Tweets and I’ve - clearly - liked a lot of them. People who are Noting are just responding to the incentive of this app, but like … that incentive is itself hollowing out the app’s intended purpose: to be a newsletter builder! This is not even to mention that Substack clearly wants to eat the lunch of Twitter from both ends: it wants to snatch up the left-leaning people who left because they hate that Elon fully made it a MAGA-friendly message board but who also find BlueSky intellectually boring and it wants to snatch the right-wingers from Twitter who know Substack is also less unlikely to deplatform them for spewing, say, straight-up Nazi propaganda.

Then, there is the fact that we have to acknowledge that the journalism apocalypse of the past half decade flooded this platform with professional, seasoned journalists who use their skills to pay their bills by building newsletters that continue the reporting they were doing before they get sacked.

And, hey, props to where props are due: most of the journalists here are exceedingly good at what they do! I want journalists to be able to pay their bills especially if they’re unshackled from corporate interests. I think that it’s wonderful that people like Brian Merchant of the excellent newsletter Blood in the Machine, for example, are able to provide good, quality reporting on specific industries and not be left high and dry because legacy media stopped valuing them.

But … man I have to be real it also does drastically raise the barrier to entry for up and coming journalists and commentators to gain any share of voice that’s sizable, and that makes me a bit sad. And this isn’t just like some random organic market effect. Substack’s discovery algorithm functionally now operates as a prestige filter. When established journalists with existing followings flood the platform, the algorithm surfaces them because they drive engagement and that just fucking buries everyone else. Again, though, it’s also just an incentives thing. We all have limited time in the day and, if someone views Substack as their version of “responsible” scrolling, what incentive do audience members really have to read the analysis of a newer, potentially less-well-sourced voice when there’s a legion of established journalists with rolodexes of sources writing their own analyses on the same topic?

Finally, there’s the Twitch thing. I mean … do I have to explain it? There is an absolute deluge of live-video content that now floods the Discover tab and the feed writ large. Everyone from the producers of content to the users are encouraged to use Substack’s abysmal mobile app to watch the thousands of hours of long-form interviews, filmed podcasts, and live narrations of long-form pieces that are produced on this platform every single day.

Why is this the case? Well, I think Substack has made a bet that a lot of its new and rapidly-growing audience simply does not want to spend its attention and time to read essays or reporting but to listen to it instead (I don’t think they’re wrong). So, what did Substack do? They made the platform easy to create multi-media through. Now, you can shoot live videos and Substack will automatically create clips that you can download and then schedule to post here as Notes. Again, the incentives to shoot and publish video here are legit.

All together, these changes, in my opinion, leave the people who want to build a writing-only platform kinda high and dry. Substack seems to be making a pretty clear renegotiation: you will either be a multi-media content producer, or you will not grow an audience that was possible to grow even two years ago. The very promise of the platform has wholesale shifted (against the desires, it seems, of a majority of its most eager written contributors).

Now to my whole thing’s subtitle of “Did we get enshitted”? Ummm… kinda. Not in the Cory Doctorow sense. What Substack did is more like a platform pivot. They looked at the market and decided to become a different product. And it sucks man but I think their bet is probably correct. The audience probably does want video and short-form and familiar bylines. Which means that, as much as I want to call this platform decay, it’s really more like an evolution that’s just leaving creators behind.

So what does this mean for people who want to grow here? I think it means we gotta just remember that Substack was never meant to be a discovery engine and was always supposed to just be a back-end email list.

You gotta build discovery somewhere else and point it here if you want to succeed, or go somewhere else. I’m sorry.

The “easy”, gut-wrenching answer means probably building a short-form video presence on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YT Shorts, or some combo. I know. I know. But that’s the current reality of where organic reach actually lives for people without pre-existing audiences.

“Corn Pop I would rather commit mass violence than contribute to the brain rot of American society via short-form content (SFC).”

Okay, I hear you. Then you better start building so laterally that you become a 2D plane. Find other small writers in your space and cross-promote aggressively. Guest post on each other’s newsletters. Build recommendation networks that aren’t dependent on Substack’s algorithm choosing to surface you. The platform won’t do this work for you anymore, so you have to build the connective tissue yourself.

And underneath all of that, the one non-negotiable: just write. A lot. The sheer quantity of you that you put into the world is the one thing no amount of pre-existing clout or connection can replace. You have to get comfortable pressing “Publish” on half-baked thoughts or even just pieces that demonstrate your own vibe because people have to want to hear from you if your writing is going to mean something.

That, or you can go ahead and just post more on r/Substack about how nothing works anymore. That works too, I guess.