Substack Doesn't Care About Readers

A good old fashioned rant, brought to you by popular vote from my readers in my Media Monday poll. Everyone loves some foaming at the mouth criticism, which I promise to provide, but I also know that complaining without offering solutions is just empty, pointless rage. I have some ideas in mind too, set aside for the end.

I’ve been writing on the web in some form or another for almost twenty years now. I’ve run blogs and webcomics and other toy websites. Nothing big, mind, because it’s always been a hobby more than anything. I enjoy it enough, that I’ve used the skills professionally. The thing about running your own blog though is…it becomes a chore. You have to manage hosting, design, code, your database, and so on by yourself. If you want to allow comments, you’re opening another can of worms: you need to be able to accept them and then prevent spam bots from taking over. Then you have to worry about security to make sure people can’t break into your site and vandalize at best and steal data at worst. Suddenly a hobby can become something an awful lot like work…and that’s before you even consider trying to get anyone to actually read the thing.

The rise of social writing sites like LiveJournal and Tumblr and WordPress starting to offer its own hosting service were appealing because it reduced a lot of this friction. Sure, you’d probably have to compromise on your site looking EXACTLY the way you wanted (being beholden to your platform of choice’s design constraints) but it let you focus on the actual writing aspect of blogging. I’ve already sort of given away the plot here, but “traditional blogging” was then quickly replaced by the social internet. Smartphones came out in the mid 00s and by the 10s were ever-present. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were no longer diversions and became the reason you went on the internet at all (if you weren’t going to buy something on Amazon, that is). Makes sense; at the end of the day, we’re social animals, so of course we love these sites.

About a decade ago, I thought Medium might “bring blogging back.” A lot of tech writers were sharing links to longform content on medium blogs, so I started dabbling. I quickly grew frustrated by its ecosystem. There was a time when every third post was titled “An Open Letter to {insert the latest pop culture craze/villain}” and then there started being Open Letters to Open Letters. When the Medium app referenced open letters in their patch notes I finally went, “all right, I want no part of this.” I would still run into Medium blogs here and there and would quickly bounce away because there were nags to either pay up or sign in. “Pardon the interruption…” as the meme went. Back to Twitter and Reddit I went when I wanted to read something…unsatisfying because both places are geared for quippy, shallow content.

So, when I started posting on Substack a year ago (I believe it has been exactly 52 Thursdays today, but I’m not going to go do the math to be sure), I came with no small amount of trepidation. I had been familiar with the site for a while because one of my favorite podcasters has a newsletter on here, and I had been under the impression this place was an email marketing platform. I guess it kind of is, but I’d been itching to write and fussing with my own blog was a pain in the neck, so what the hey. Maybe my buddies would like to have my writing delivered straight to their inbox. It’d be a good place to “put in reps” and develop the practice and discipline to do what I truly love (write novels).

I have a love hate relationship with this place. It’s got a pretty good writing interface and decent publishing tools. You have just enough leeway to make your publication site look like your own without absolutely being able to wreck it. Delivering stuff to people via email is a great idea in theory—you can have readers outside the Substack ecosystem participate—but I suspect most people ignore their email folders because of constant bombardment by marketers. There are a lot of clever and even brilliant people on here, and some excellent writing. I’ve read stuff that competes (and even surpasses) some of the mainstream publishers put out. Thoughtful journalists have ended up here after being laid off by the capital-M Media who treat everything like entertainment. The core value prop of Substack, at least as I understood it, was a place for writers. It should follow, then, that it is also a place for readers.

But Substack Doesn’t Care About Readers

I’ve watched keenly for the past year how the people running this place are treating it and it’s clear now that writing isn’t their main value proposition anymore (if it ever really was) and that’s reinforced by the fact where it spends its energy. Let me put on my Martin Luther robes and nail a list of grievances on the proverbial door (you probably know ‘em)

1. Publication Pages Invisible in App
   The lovely website I mentioned a couple paragraphs above…only works if you visit a publication on the web. In the app, the pages and sections (did you even know you can set up sections?) you set up are not accessible at all. Wasted potential

2. Terrible Serialization Support
   Substack SHOULD be a great platform for serialized fiction (and other sorts of serialization). How often do you see “The Alien Crab - Chapter 7” in your feed and think, “Wow, I want to read The Alien Crab…but I don’t want to start at chapter 7…:(“ Unless the author has gone through the trouble of linking you back to previous chapters of their work (an annoyingly manual process) you have to go to their profile and hunt for the original chapter. That’s too much friction

3. No eReader support
   Longform content has been digital for almost two decades now.

4. Tags are practically useless
   Maybe I’m a curmudgeon here, but tags are important to me. Substack apparently uses LLMs to determine what kind of content an article is, which, okay, but why aren’t the author’s tags given any weight? You can add tags, but readers can’t really filter your archive by them.

5. Finding Articles is Annoying

   Search has gotten a LITTLE better recently, but when you click on it you’re given a bunch of curated topics. Clicking on them shows you a combination of notes and posts, but favor the notes and even video content. If you want to READ something you have to set your search filter to “posts” only which really only gives you a list of titles. You could also browse entire publications I guess…but generally I find using google to find stuff on substack a more reliable vector

6. SubstackTV
   The writing was on the wall in January when the “app for writers” announced an app for AppleTV and GoogleTV. I haven’t heard much about it since, but it signaled the people running the ship have designs beyond writing

7. Polymarket Prediction Markets

   I’m not sure who wants or uses this feature that they added in February. Perhaps journalists find it useful for quick trends. I personally think polymarket ought to be illegal. it’s existence here, at best is because of an investment by polymarket

Solutions

Like I said in the foreword, complaining about this without offering answers is really just rage masturbation. So, I’ll imagine myself as the head of product engineering and suggest some things I think would make this app a better place.

Filters

One of my most popular notes on here was about filters

Magazine Mode

EBook Reading Interface