I think I must be an anomaly here because I barely glance at notes. I also try to keep the publications to which I subscribe to a minimum so that I can actually keep track of them all. Anything more starts to feel messy and stressful. Even then I’ve had to accept that I actually don’t have to read everything that arrives in my inbox. Honestly, Substack is just a medium by which I receive articles I want to read. I don’t expect anything else of it. But that is much easier as a reader rather than a writer.
This seems like the healthy relationship with the platform everyone should have. Trying to make every reader into a super-reader is not good for the business model, as far as I’m concerned. As for Notes, I’ve learned to really enjoy it because I have a lot of quick thoughts and observations…but as much as I enjoy it, interaction there is much higher than it is on an article. That’s a rough place for any artist to be.
I’m in the same boat as you as a reader. As a writer and a publisher I use Substack as a newsletter platform for my readers. It’s free, it’s easy to use and I find that a lot of my subs that engage are friends and family and supporters and I love getting their feedback! My money comes from driving fans to my publishing projects and it works! If Notes help that great, it’s all icing on the cake. It doesn’t matter if it’s Substack, Image Comics, my book distributors or any other vehicle for my work, the person that cares the most about my work and drives the most engagement has always been ME. Anyone hoping for a shortcut to that is always going to feel slighted. This has been the truth before the internet was a thing
This is spot-on. There was a golden window in 2024 and 2025, by now most of the fun has gone out of it. I still enjoy great work by brilliant writers, but as a writer myself, it feels like pushing against an increasing headwind. I’d rather use my time to write well than to “engage” on Notes.
I do a very specific thing here that is served by both publishing and Notes, so I enjoy Notes as a part of that. But I’m not here for Notes first. I’m here to publish my work.
"In many ways, it feels like a clock began to tick down the moment Substack started prioritizing larger writers over the aspiring writers and dreamers who will never be able to compete with A-listers, with awards winners, with some of the biggest journalists in the world. "
True to form for social media. Building on the backs of the millions of smaller accounts while putting effort into the larger ones and features to benefit them. That's why we are seeing now things like the " new bestsellers" leaderboard.
Yup. The life cycle of social media platforms has a particular sort of pattern. It’s interesting to hear how it all works from your perspective as a creative. Thank you.
I generally hate sharing this stuff, as I’m here to talk about art. But Substack presents itself as a publishing tool for artists and I felt I should share some of my experiences.
I’m fairly new to Substack. I’ve come to think of it like this: Notes are the guy in a hot dog suit outside the mattress store. I may wave and say hello, but I’m there for a bed. Posts are the bed.
Capital is pure - follow the money, the end. Substack entertains me because it rhymes with my last (and final) big tech gig. That was Microsoft Teams and I ran a growth group. Growth PMs obsessively measure every feature, every platform pattern with a singular focus.
For Teams as a commercial product bundled w/ office, we just needed engaged users. For Substack as a consumer product they need both user growth and revenue growth. The only model that consistently works here is ads. Ads-in-a-feed, smoke like weed. But timing is key. First you need enough engaged users to lock in the network effect.
The letter you refer to is funny, it was written by AI; pure engagement farming by the author and it worked.
And Microsoft is managing to screw up Teams, which could and should have become its revolutionary product. They got it 80% done, threw together the next 5% in a half-assed manner, and left the remaining 15% to rot.
I worked for a company that was a beta user of Teams in 2017 and my department wrote the SOPs for company use. Annoys me to see such quick destruction of something I liked. A lot.
Then again, capital is also based on market differentiation. If Substack becomes meaningfully pretty much the same as everything else, it won't be attractive to new writers (including those that might import big followings).
I think that’s a literal interpretation of the title, Paul. Though, to be fair, the open letter complaining about things like AI was, at least in part, written by AI. I should’ve written a piece about that, too.
I feel this. I started publishing author interviews to Substack recently for my bookstore but quickly found that to reach people you have to also do yet another social media thing where everyone is shouting to be heard. Considering Medium while I still have little engagement here ... It's too bad because Substack is so easy and pleasant to use.
I'm not sure if Medium offers any real growth opportunity. I spent two years there, overlapping with Substack, and found the community there very disappointing by comparison and growth almost non-existent. Have you looked at Ghost? As for Patreon, it's introducing new features to help people find your work.
I thought the open letter was right in some respects, but your assessment of it as pointless is spot on. Which leads to a fundamental problem with the idea of “community” as some people see it here. As a writer who doesn’t use AI, I now see that the letter doesn’t benefit me in the slightest. The beneficiary is the author who has used a virtue signal to “engagement hack” the “community.” This was unlikely the intention, but because it is pointless, that is the outcome.
This is the truest part of your post. << In many ways, it feels like a clock began to tick down the moment Substack started prioritizing larger writers over the aspiring writers and dreamers who will never be able to compete with A-listers, with awards winners, with some of the biggest journalists in the world. You might even say the power dynamic here has wildly changed — because it has. >>
The minute they held their first conference and invited only “important” people, it became a different place. Only thing serving as baling wire and duct tape: They don’t have serious competition for the “long-form + newsletter” format. Yet.
I checked out both of those last year (year before?, time flies) when Substack had that initial conference and showed their hand. Following are my perceptions. If something has changed, or if I misunderstood something, let me know.
Ghost: More of a Web site building platform with blogging capabilities. I already have static Web sites through Shopify, that have a clean UI and allow me to mix an online store with a traditional Web site. Ghost felt more like Wordpress, which I had fled for Shopify, after WP complicated their clean interface **and** announced they were getting into the business of AI and would be scraping all WP sites for their LLM.
I looked up Ghost after seeing their site building “templates,” and sure enough, they’d hired a former WP guru. Yuck.
Patreon had two issues for me personally. First, it’s geared more for visual arts and music, not text. Second, I felt that the compensation model was way too opaque.
Beehiiv has been aggressively going after Substackers, but it’s expensive. Essentially a paid email newsletter service. Writers pay them. The only way writers make money from Beehiiv: Allow Beehiiv to insert advertisements in the emails. I am not a particularly gifted athlete, but I ran away from that option as fast as possible.
Note that although I initially used Substack simply as vehicle for our newsletter, like you, I don’t dislike Notes. Substack provides a community feel I don’t get from our static Web sites. Even were Shopify to add a genuine blogging experience, there’s no community.
We saw it happen in real time, announcement email after announcement email :
We saw Substack, the smart newsletter-website builder evolve into the smart readers' Twitter, then into the celebrity-praising smart Twitter/Instagram, and currently, this very comment will train their LLM.
We believe you're onto something when you talk about your alternative sources of income, because for many aspiring dreamers, even if Substack goes full TikTok at somepoint (Lord forbid), they will still be able to use it as a jumpstart to reach non-Substack based audiences and partners.
Just like famous writers and journalists used their non-Substack fame to rise quickly on this new platform, which we still see positively : "if your faves are here too, you're at the right spot, right ?"
Regarding the 1,000 newsletter in the inbox, it's called Sub"stack" after all : Any intensive reader would enjoy an alexandrian-size library, and this company knows it.
Regarding Notes, we still believe that the best way to have a Twitter-minded audience is to communicate through Twitter-driven means : "Want a different audience ? Think different."
We see modest artists and essayists coming from and going to other paid subscrition/tip-based platforms while keeping their Substack for reach rather than income.
This was of course at the core of the experience because website integration always existed here :
Interoperability has always driven the feature releases on Substack and its writers have collectively started to realize that emphasizing on features like Notes and more widely basic schemes for Capital goes against that very principle.
It seems to me that articles on Medium (launched on August 15, 2012) rarely pop up. I noticed Medium, which seems to be in decline, does not have the re-stack feature or Notes, both of which I enjoy. Also glad to hear the other side from authors with a substantial following -- such as Cole Haddon.
Medium has just relented on the repost feature, but made little mention of it - with their typically lousy comms - and very few people seem to be using it. It's also unclear what influence it might have, given that 'featuring' on pubs (essentially the same feature but with pub editors promoting a piece to pub followers, rather than personally) seems to do little or nothing.
Medium looked like they were leaning into Mastodon as a parallel Notes-type adjunct - with the advantage of being less distracting, while offering user groups a channel for chit-chat - but again, communication was half-hearted, and commitment from staff members not even that. It seems to have been quietly dropped for the moment.
I just use Substack Notes as 'civilised, intellectual Twitter' within my little echo chamber, and have given up posting longer articles here. I'm actually more likely to get a response - though not significantly larger reader numbers in general - on Medium.
If Medium added a Notes functionality, I would ditch this place, which has more of the techbro stench to it.
I found Medium to be a frustrating experience, mostly because its compensation schemes changed every other month - making it an unreliable publishing partner. But yes, there are many other options besides Substack. I think a lot of us are still here because we like the communities we've built and we're tired of moving around so much...but that will only hold so long.
What annoyed me most about Medium, more than the wildly fluctuating earnings formula, was the unreliable distribution. The way the algorithm seemed like a goldfish with dementia, completely forgetting from one story to the next who had shown an interest last time around.
All I ever wanted from it was a sense of steady progress, a slowly widening circle of discovery, rather than the peristaltic spasms of a struggling earthworm.
Nonetheless, what very little momentum remains there for me is still more than I have seen here, despite meaninglessly flattering numbers of ‘followers’ and ‘subscribers’.
Either is better than posting into the void on an old-school blog, it is true. But neither offers any great sense of achievement. And I do feel that Medium’s corporate heart (to coin an oxymoron) is more in the right place than Substack’s.
I'm mindful you weren't asking me, but in my experience, Medium prefers to make money while weaponizing writer's (and editor's) empathy. IOW, they make money off the back of a lot of free labor wile using words like "Sharing" and "gifts." For all it's faults, at least Substack has never pretended to want anything but to make money.
Yeah, the ‘free labour’ and ‘community guilt trip-generation’ are definitely monetisable elements for Medium. Though I suppose any social medium relies on and exploits the reluctance to abandon, and self-imposed obligation to actively contribute to, the (frankly bullshit) ‘community’ one has built up.
You could argue that Tony Stubblebine’s utterly inept PR is, like Doja Cat telling her fans they are sad losers and she doesn’t care or even think about them, a way of being brutally honest about that.
But I would say that Substack very much does (both HM and CB) try to sell itself as ‘liberation for writers’, ‘the idyllic platform where creatives are in control and your words can fly free’, ‘a new, unshackled way of writing’, blah, blah, bleurgh.
It doesn’t do much to hide the reality (‘Roll up, roll up! Nazis and rapists welcome here! Every dollar’s a good dollar!’), but it does also engage in virtuous window-dressing.
Everyone has different goals for “showing up” on a platform. Aren’t they all owned by a tech bro? ⁉️ Speaking for myself, I’ve had many good experiences on Substack.
Medium was founded by one of the Twitter guys, right? Evan something? And I imagine he still holds plenty of stock. So yes, it’s ‘techbro-owned and founded’.
The big difference is in tone and ambition. Medium (largely) enforces robust hate speech rules, and seems to have little drive other than to balance the books.
Substack, like other platforms, has an ‘anything goes, gung-ho pro-growth’ attitude, which is claims with forked tongue is based on ‘free speech absolutism’, but actually means ‘nazi rapist dollars matter too - that megayacht ain’t gonna buy itself’.
That’s the stench I refer to. Techbros can choose to be civilised global citizens, or rampaging barbarians. Most choose the latter path, as is the case with the management here.
I think I must be an anomaly here because I barely glance at notes. I also try to keep the publications to which I subscribe to a minimum so that I can actually keep track of them all. Anything more starts to feel messy and stressful. Even then I’ve had to accept that I actually don’t have to read everything that arrives in my inbox. Honestly, Substack is just a medium by which I receive articles I want to read. I don’t expect anything else of it. But that is much easier as a reader rather than a writer.
This seems like the healthy relationship with the platform everyone should have. Trying to make every reader into a super-reader is not good for the business model, as far as I’m concerned. As for Notes, I’ve learned to really enjoy it because I have a lot of quick thoughts and observations…but as much as I enjoy it, interaction there is much higher than it is on an article. That’s a rough place for any artist to be.
I’m in the same boat as you as a reader. As a writer and a publisher I use Substack as a newsletter platform for my readers. It’s free, it’s easy to use and I find that a lot of my subs that engage are friends and family and supporters and I love getting their feedback! My money comes from driving fans to my publishing projects and it works! If Notes help that great, it’s all icing on the cake. It doesn’t matter if it’s Substack, Image Comics, my book distributors or any other vehicle for my work, the person that cares the most about my work and drives the most engagement has always been ME. Anyone hoping for a shortcut to that is always going to feel slighted. This has been the truth before the internet was a thing
I don't read Notes either, and keep my subs down. My inbox is too full as it is. :(
This is spot-on. There was a golden window in 2024 and 2025, by now most of the fun has gone out of it. I still enjoy great work by brilliant writers, but as a writer myself, it feels like pushing against an increasing headwind. I’d rather use my time to write well than to “engage” on Notes.
I do a very specific thing here that is served by both publishing and Notes, so I enjoy Notes as a part of that. But I’m not here for Notes first. I’m here to publish my work.
Same.
"In many ways, it feels like a clock began to tick down the moment Substack started prioritizing larger writers over the aspiring writers and dreamers who will never be able to compete with A-listers, with awards winners, with some of the biggest journalists in the world. "
True to form for social media. Building on the backs of the millions of smaller accounts while putting effort into the larger ones and features to benefit them. That's why we are seeing now things like the " new bestsellers" leaderboard.
Shared this to Notes for extra engagement.
Thanks, Richard!
Yup. The life cycle of social media platforms has a particular sort of pattern. It’s interesting to hear how it all works from your perspective as a creative. Thank you.
I generally hate sharing this stuff, as I’m here to talk about art. But Substack presents itself as a publishing tool for artists and I felt I should share some of my experiences.
I’m fairly new to Substack. I’ve come to think of it like this: Notes are the guy in a hot dog suit outside the mattress store. I may wave and say hello, but I’m there for a bed. Posts are the bed.
I genuinely enjoy Notes because many of the things I want to do are more appropriate to its space. But I’m here to make and sell beds.
I wish you weren't right about stuff so often.
My wife hates it.
Capital is pure - follow the money, the end. Substack entertains me because it rhymes with my last (and final) big tech gig. That was Microsoft Teams and I ran a growth group. Growth PMs obsessively measure every feature, every platform pattern with a singular focus.
For Teams as a commercial product bundled w/ office, we just needed engaged users. For Substack as a consumer product they need both user growth and revenue growth. The only model that consistently works here is ads. Ads-in-a-feed, smoke like weed. But timing is key. First you need enough engaged users to lock in the network effect.
The letter you refer to is funny, it was written by AI; pure engagement farming by the author and it worked.
Yes, the letter in question has turned into its own source of hilarity. Have you read about the Steven Rosenbaum book about AI?
Yep i heard about that. Too much recursion buddy.
My daughter gave me an openAI expose by Karen Hao for my bday and I’m going to get into it this week.
And Microsoft is managing to screw up Teams, which could and should have become its revolutionary product. They got it 80% done, threw together the next 5% in a half-assed manner, and left the remaining 15% to rot.
I worked for a company that was a beta user of Teams in 2017 and my department wrote the SOPs for company use. Annoys me to see such quick destruction of something I liked. A lot.
Guess i shouldn’tve left lol
Then again, capital is also based on market differentiation. If Substack becomes meaningfully pretty much the same as everything else, it won't be attractive to new writers (including those that might import big followings).
Can you tell I'm an optimist?
I’m an optimist with a cache of realism hiding in the locker under my bed for when it’s needed.
Marked 'break in case of emergencies'? 😁
It pains me to say that your observations are spot on, Cole. Well said, my friend. See you in the funny papers. Rasha.
Great piece. Thank you!
Thanks, Liz!
While I agree with ALMOST everything you've said (which is great by the way)... writers will be writers, and they should keep writing :)
I think that’s a literal interpretation of the title, Paul. Though, to be fair, the open letter complaining about things like AI was, at least in part, written by AI. I should’ve written a piece about that, too.
Yeah... you're not wrong there!
I feel this. I started publishing author interviews to Substack recently for my bookstore but quickly found that to reach people you have to also do yet another social media thing where everyone is shouting to be heard. Considering Medium while I still have little engagement here ... It's too bad because Substack is so easy and pleasant to use.
I'm not sure if Medium offers any real growth opportunity. I spent two years there, overlapping with Substack, and found the community there very disappointing by comparison and growth almost non-existent. Have you looked at Ghost? As for Patreon, it's introducing new features to help people find your work.
I thought the open letter was right in some respects, but your assessment of it as pointless is spot on. Which leads to a fundamental problem with the idea of “community” as some people see it here. As a writer who doesn’t use AI, I now see that the letter doesn’t benefit me in the slightest. The beneficiary is the author who has used a virtue signal to “engagement hack” the “community.” This was unlikely the intention, but because it is pointless, that is the outcome.
Hey Robert, are you aware that author used AI to write that open letter?
No! That’s hilarious! Honestly, the clown show has become a fully formed circus. Maybe I’m being too generous about his intent.
I don't know the guy, but "writers" talking about AI while using AI to "write" are multiplying like mogwai in a Turkish bathhouse.
This is the truest part of your post. << In many ways, it feels like a clock began to tick down the moment Substack started prioritizing larger writers over the aspiring writers and dreamers who will never be able to compete with A-listers, with awards winners, with some of the biggest journalists in the world. You might even say the power dynamic here has wildly changed — because it has. >>
The minute they held their first conference and invited only “important” people, it became a different place. Only thing serving as baling wire and duct tape: They don’t have serious competition for the “long-form + newsletter” format. Yet.
I know a LOT of people who have fled to Ghost and back to Patreon. We'll see if that continues!
I checked out both of those last year (year before?, time flies) when Substack had that initial conference and showed their hand. Following are my perceptions. If something has changed, or if I misunderstood something, let me know.
Ghost: More of a Web site building platform with blogging capabilities. I already have static Web sites through Shopify, that have a clean UI and allow me to mix an online store with a traditional Web site. Ghost felt more like Wordpress, which I had fled for Shopify, after WP complicated their clean interface **and** announced they were getting into the business of AI and would be scraping all WP sites for their LLM.
I looked up Ghost after seeing their site building “templates,” and sure enough, they’d hired a former WP guru. Yuck.
Patreon had two issues for me personally. First, it’s geared more for visual arts and music, not text. Second, I felt that the compensation model was way too opaque.
Beehiiv has been aggressively going after Substackers, but it’s expensive. Essentially a paid email newsletter service. Writers pay them. The only way writers make money from Beehiiv: Allow Beehiiv to insert advertisements in the emails. I am not a particularly gifted athlete, but I ran away from that option as fast as possible.
Note that although I initially used Substack simply as vehicle for our newsletter, like you, I don’t dislike Notes. Substack provides a community feel I don’t get from our static Web sites. Even were Shopify to add a genuine blogging experience, there’s no community.
We saw it happen in real time, announcement email after announcement email :
We saw Substack, the smart newsletter-website builder evolve into the smart readers' Twitter, then into the celebrity-praising smart Twitter/Instagram, and currently, this very comment will train their LLM.
We believe you're onto something when you talk about your alternative sources of income, because for many aspiring dreamers, even if Substack goes full TikTok at somepoint (Lord forbid), they will still be able to use it as a jumpstart to reach non-Substack based audiences and partners.
Just like famous writers and journalists used their non-Substack fame to rise quickly on this new platform, which we still see positively : "if your faves are here too, you're at the right spot, right ?"
Regarding the 1,000 newsletter in the inbox, it's called Sub"stack" after all : Any intensive reader would enjoy an alexandrian-size library, and this company knows it.
Regarding Notes, we still believe that the best way to have a Twitter-minded audience is to communicate through Twitter-driven means : "Want a different audience ? Think different."
We see modest artists and essayists coming from and going to other paid subscrition/tip-based platforms while keeping their Substack for reach rather than income.
This was of course at the core of the experience because website integration always existed here :
Interoperability has always driven the feature releases on Substack and its writers have collectively started to realize that emphasizing on features like Notes and more widely basic schemes for Capital goes against that very principle.
It seems to me that articles on Medium (launched on August 15, 2012) rarely pop up. I noticed Medium, which seems to be in decline, does not have the re-stack feature or Notes, both of which I enjoy. Also glad to hear the other side from authors with a substantial following -- such as Cole Haddon.
Medium has just relented on the repost feature, but made little mention of it - with their typically lousy comms - and very few people seem to be using it. It's also unclear what influence it might have, given that 'featuring' on pubs (essentially the same feature but with pub editors promoting a piece to pub followers, rather than personally) seems to do little or nothing.
Medium looked like they were leaning into Mastodon as a parallel Notes-type adjunct - with the advantage of being less distracting, while offering user groups a channel for chit-chat - but again, communication was half-hearted, and commitment from staff members not even that. It seems to have been quietly dropped for the moment.
I just use Substack Notes as 'civilised, intellectual Twitter' within my little echo chamber, and have given up posting longer articles here. I'm actually more likely to get a response - though not significantly larger reader numbers in general - on Medium.
If Medium added a Notes functionality, I would ditch this place, which has more of the techbro stench to it.
I found Medium to be a frustrating experience, mostly because its compensation schemes changed every other month - making it an unreliable publishing partner. But yes, there are many other options besides Substack. I think a lot of us are still here because we like the communities we've built and we're tired of moving around so much...but that will only hold so long.
What annoyed me most about Medium, more than the wildly fluctuating earnings formula, was the unreliable distribution. The way the algorithm seemed like a goldfish with dementia, completely forgetting from one story to the next who had shown an interest last time around.
All I ever wanted from it was a sense of steady progress, a slowly widening circle of discovery, rather than the peristaltic spasms of a struggling earthworm.
Nonetheless, what very little momentum remains there for me is still more than I have seen here, despite meaninglessly flattering numbers of ‘followers’ and ‘subscribers’.
Either is better than posting into the void on an old-school blog, it is true. But neither offers any great sense of achievement. And I do feel that Medium’s corporate heart (to coin an oxymoron) is more in the right place than Substack’s.
I'm mindful you weren't asking me, but in my experience, Medium prefers to make money while weaponizing writer's (and editor's) empathy. IOW, they make money off the back of a lot of free labor wile using words like "Sharing" and "gifts." For all it's faults, at least Substack has never pretended to want anything but to make money.
Yeah, the ‘free labour’ and ‘community guilt trip-generation’ are definitely monetisable elements for Medium. Though I suppose any social medium relies on and exploits the reluctance to abandon, and self-imposed obligation to actively contribute to, the (frankly bullshit) ‘community’ one has built up.
You could argue that Tony Stubblebine’s utterly inept PR is, like Doja Cat telling her fans they are sad losers and she doesn’t care or even think about them, a way of being brutally honest about that.
But I would say that Substack very much does (both HM and CB) try to sell itself as ‘liberation for writers’, ‘the idyllic platform where creatives are in control and your words can fly free’, ‘a new, unshackled way of writing’, blah, blah, bleurgh.
It doesn’t do much to hide the reality (‘Roll up, roll up! Nazis and rapists welcome here! Every dollar’s a good dollar!’), but it does also engage in virtuous window-dressing.
Everyone has different goals for “showing up” on a platform. Aren’t they all owned by a tech bro? ⁉️ Speaking for myself, I’ve had many good experiences on Substack.
Medium was founded by one of the Twitter guys, right? Evan something? And I imagine he still holds plenty of stock. So yes, it’s ‘techbro-owned and founded’.
The big difference is in tone and ambition. Medium (largely) enforces robust hate speech rules, and seems to have little drive other than to balance the books.
Substack, like other platforms, has an ‘anything goes, gung-ho pro-growth’ attitude, which is claims with forked tongue is based on ‘free speech absolutism’, but actually means ‘nazi rapist dollars matter too - that megayacht ain’t gonna buy itself’.
That’s the stench I refer to. Techbros can choose to be civilised global citizens, or rampaging barbarians. Most choose the latter path, as is the case with the management here.
Yes, tech bros can decide to police the platform -- or encourage robust hate speech that has its own disordered and dedicated following.
Medium: "We're not Substack!"
Also Medium: (quietly adopts most of Substack's features.)
Regarding Featuring: Can confirm that featuring a piece does very little in the way of boosting metrics or surfacing one's work to new readers.