Over the last year I’ve been watching Substack lose its value. It started as an advertised REFUGE from mainstream idiocy, and now it’s just an alternate channel of mainstream idiocy.
At first I couldn’t spot the exact trouble. For sure, clickbait and partisan teams are taking over, crowding out the more subtle writers. Is it converging to standard censorship? No. I don’t see any signs of censoring, or any complaints by writers.
After the introduction of the twitteroid Notes the decline was faster, and now the reason is fairly clear thanks to some revelations by disgruntled ex-writers. Substack is mostly an MLM or pyramid scheme. The top writers gain more subscriptions by attracting recommendations from the newer writers. Newer writers get very little revenue until they rise in the ranks. The management has been bringing in ORDINARY mass media superstars who are not independent by any definition, and keeping them happy with secret advances and deals.
I also saw much less interaction with this blog. Before Notes, I could make one of my usual snarky comments, and a couple people would check my profile and look here. I haven’t changed my commenting, and I don’t think my writing here has changed in the last two years**, but the traffic from those comments has dropped to zero.
The final AHA came just now when I tried to link a silly bit from 2015 in a silly comment at Notes. There wasn’t anything remotely political or controversial about the comment or the link, but Substack tossed it back with a “Failed To Share” message.
In other words, Substack wants everything to be purely self-contained, just as Twitter does.
= = = = =
** Constants and variables: My recent writing is definitely inferior to what I wrote before 2020. When I reprint something from 2014 to 2019, it’s unquestionably sharper prose and deeper thinking than post-2020. Maybe it’s just aging, maybe the Gumption Consumption of the last few insane wartime years. But the switch within Substack happened well inside my recent inferior period, so it didn’t coincide with a change in my own production.
Polistra's Mill 