Posts about slop are slop

There is a recognizable genre on Substack where posts are made to criticize the platform by begging the CEO for change. These posts rack up hundreds of likes, maybe even thousands, and more engagement than any other post written by the author prior. Much of the discourse is heavily focused on the idea of supposed success on the platform, based on having to indulge in a sort of viral campaign. What’s ironic is that the single most dependable way to go viral is to complain about virality.

The rhetoric is often the same assertion: that Substack was built for long-form writing and essays and therefore Notes are a betrayal, a sign of social media and a devolution of the original intent. What irks me is this idea that the only real writer is a long-form writer, and that the only true denizen of a platform such as Substack, the most incorruptible, is a long-form writer. This was never the intent of the platform. It’s been said ad nauseam:

At the core of Substack’s mission is the belief that, by democratizing the tools that they need to create independent businesses, we can help writers succeed in an era in which the overall market for news grows dramatically.

- Chris Best

It’s there to give you the tools to be an independent writer. Maybe that’s poetry, maybe that’s long-form writing, maybe that’s fiction, non-fiction, or stories of lesbian werewolves.

Notes tends to get the highest degree of attention, maybe because it’s largely what Substack has leaned into. It’s very difficult to get any kind of traction without being on Notes. I’ve taken a bit of a detour and broken from it over the last two weeks, and seen a drop in my viewership and engagement. I did it because I would spend far too much time on it and I needed to protect my mental capacity. But I’m also saddened because it’s where I’ve felt a real community. I didn’t feel that with just Posts alone.

These open letters often arrive at one standard fix: prioritize Posts over Notes. But Notes exist because long-form content is not easily discoverable. There is a sea of posts, a sea of short fiction, long fiction, serialized fiction. We trust in our friends and the people we follow to share the kind of content they enjoy and in lieu of that we trust in Notes to surface the creators themselves. Notes are the teasers that introduce you to the Post or the author. It’s the window display that urges you to walk inside and spend. Sometimes it’s gratuitous, silly, pandering or outright hateful. So are the Posts.

For many, Notes offer a space where a nobody can become a somebody. It’s either that or they resort to mentioning their Substack at every dinner party.

The internet simultaneously made it possible for everyone to be a writer, but it also made it difficult to be seen as one, because you’re constantly fighting algorithms at every turn. And yet those same algorithms are the only thing that allows someone to be surfaced in the first place, the answer to the problem of infinite access and noise.

Sometimes the complaint isn’t necessarily about Notes but the kind of Notes or the kind of Posts, or what is now referred to as slop. So what are some examples of slop?

One-line aphorisms that are akin to a political campaign message. Questions that force or encourage engagement, such as “Describe your Substack in three words or less.” Baiting hot takes that almost beg you to respond. Pictures of nature with large captions, sometimes in italics. I won’t deny it exists and I’ve made my fair share of contributions.

And it’s certainly not all a product of Notes. We’ve seen Posts that claim you can go from 100 to 1,000 subscribers in one month. The ones that promise to sell you a playbook on garnering attention. The ones that tell you to love yourself by buying a course, just click the link at the end of this post. The irony in a lot of this writing is that often the complaint itself is yet another form of slop. I see posts that have so much engagement: individuals that agree with them, sharing their own grievance, concern, and slop. Without pause, without any irony, we have links urging commenters to read their own fiction, their own stories, or to subscribe for a more authentic experience.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is all manufactured outrage. I think there is still that genuine feeling of wanting to be read, wanting to be enjoyed, and wanting to be seen. There’s a reason I turned off the stats on my subscription and it’s because I wasn’t growing. It wasn’t because I didn’t care. It’s because I needed to not care. Over time I found myself coming back to the why. Why did I care for those stats in the first place? Because that wasn’t the case when I started this writing journey. I simply enjoyed writing and I was happy when I received a single comment or like, not angry when I didn’t receive a hundred.

I’ll never know the true intention behind why someone wrote a post that decries slop, but I’ll always feel like in many ways it’s just another form of gatekeeping. There’s always someone who wants a platform to be something different: more free speech, more long-form writing, more whimsy, and less social media.

If the platform is rewarding slop, then surely the work being ignored must be the good stuff. It’s a comforting explanation. It means the problem isn’t that there are millions of us wanting to be read, but that the wrong kind of writing is being read. It forms a moral hierarchy where virality or higher visibility is proof of corruption and obscurity becomes proof of integrity.

If you still think the Substack algorithm buries everything that’s worth reading then you have to ask yourself: why did your anti-slop post rise to the top?

I don’t have a neat answer for you.

I just have a Substack.

If you like my writing and want to say thanks with a few dollars, please consider buying me a coffee.