A brief appreciation letter for Substack in honor of its recent funding success.
As someone who has enjoyed reading the NYT, the National Review, the American Conservative, NPR, Vox, the Atlantic, occasional posts from N+1, the London Review of Books, the Cut, XOjane, Vulture, mommy blogs, mormon blogs, mormon mommy blogs, and sending my friends essays where they ask me why I don’t have better things to do with my time than reading 10,000 word essays (I really don’t, this isn’t even the most embarrassing way I spend my time), Substack has been growing on me in leaps and bounds.
Substack really has become a hybridized hub where most of these different spoke types of written media can be found, and it’s done so more effectively than medium, blogspot, or wordpress before it, as far as I can tell. No, you can’t get “traditional” journalism on substack, but you can get a lot of really interesting writing from figures that I followed closely when they fit into more conventional journalist institutions - Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, Bari Weiss, and others who’ve had bylines in some illustrious publications are all kicking around here in some form or another.
Twitter was effectively the center of the global information universe from roughly 2011-2023, and this played a major role in our information environment getting worse. Twitter was short form that - even before it algorithmically punished you for adding links to outside content - made it difficult to provide sources, made it difficult to add nuance. The return of long form writing adds a lot of texture to the conversation; and it alone humanizes people beyond what was easily accessible on Twitter. I see more granularity even in the hot takes; it becomes easier to distinguish between someone claiming x because y and someone claiming x because z. The medium itself expands the possibility of reduced tension and better understanding, largely because it correlates more detail and effort required to bang out your thoughts.
Simply put, Substack feels much more like interacting with real, whole people than Twitter (usually) did for me, and I really value being able to say more and put more effort into my public writing.
I’m being really buy the world a coke naive about this, of course (I love to be hyperbolic). Substack isn’t perfect, it can’t remove the potential for humans to misunderstand each other, get things wrong, be hyperbolic, etc. I’m still right about some of the positive second order effects here.
I see more cross pollination between different political and even apolitical (e.g. rationalist and/or grey tribe) groups here, and it’s much harder to pin someone’s exact opinions down based on a starter perusal of their content. That’s always been the case, but shorter form made it much more rewarding to fit into a narrow and easily digestible box.
There is more room for your ideas to breathe, leaving more room for them to spread organically. Weeds and surprising foreign blooms are less costly to have around - surprising deviations from a persona are more approved here than elsewhere, making audience capture at least a little easier to avoid.
There’s a real possibility that as Substack gains market share and information/eyeball share, we’ll see some real improvements in how we model other people and political opponents. A world in which every journalist is on Substack is going to have more dimension than a world in which every journalist is on Twitter: the medium shapes what is communicated, and long form allows for better communication in almost every sense.
I’m extremely bullish on the longterm outcomes of Substack for the information ecosystem, and I’m excited to be here.
Hope I don't sound conceited here, but I have some really good ideas that I've struggled to get published in op-ed form. I've had luck with official publications a few times, but also had essays that I felt were really well formed and really well argued not get taken. One editor told me no one cares about my issue (improving maternity care) right now because there's too much else going on politically. While the decision to self publish on Substack was hard, I see the benefits you're talking about. Maybe the public at large doesn't care about "my issue" but some people do. And this makes finding them possible. I read NYT daily but lately I've found myself spending as much time or more on Substack.
I like that polarity of social media taking the world by storm because of how short and quick making messages/writing was but now we live in an era where Substack is gaining popularity because people crave more long form and well thought out writing but also having the mirage of a social media like platform.
It’s a good balance and gives me hope for the future, especially if it prevents another generation’s attention spans and brains from getting fried.
The only worrying thing about it is that all this momentum Substack is gaining could be hit by a train in the form of Artificial general intelligence and if it gains some sort of monopoly on the information landscape whether it be by having AI journalists or even AI filtering mechanisms for information. Anyway, we’ll see.
Great article btw.