Comment by ricardobeat a day ago
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
That explains a lot. Thank you! What a weird business decision on their part. I would guess the minimum has something to with payment processing overhead, but Patreon handles 1-2$ monthly payments no problem and always has. Strange.
There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh take on blogging, but the number of big names that have come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked in.
I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least in line with the rest of the net.