At least for me the Substack app on iPad is developing real gravity. It’s almost like an old school rss reader in that it brings together all my various Substack subscriptions in one handy place and has consistently been the second app I open in the morning after reading the Times. Yes, it’s driven by the individual writers I follow, particularly Yglesias as he writes every morning and I find his daily writing useful and informative, but at the same time I now follow enough newsletters that it consistently has interesting writing and is a place I affirmatively go on a daily basis. That said I’m also a weirdo who started using rss to structure my information diet in the early 2000s and never gave it up, so I may be completely unrepresentative.
Oct 20, 2023·edited Oct 20, 2023Liked by Jeremiah Johnson
I think in order for Substack to be sticky, it needs an all-you-can-eat subscription. I'm not going to wander the site just to hit paywall after paywall - that's frustrating. In a world where I automatically have access to hundreds of writers, though, I'd work a lot harder at finding more people I'm interested in.
It seems like 90% of substack discoverability exists outside of substack. But the email sign-ups are by far the best feature for monetizing readers. Unlike any social media site, getting a full article in a light email form on demand is way better than logging into a bloated app with a million more distractions. It helps atomize substack and makes the (frankly sometimes steep) cost of subscription feel more targeted. You pay money, you get articles and maybe podcasts sent directly to you.
I don't know if appifying substack works well. Notes sucks. It repeats weeks old posts and the dearth of content makes the algorithm so weak that I still can't get rid of Brett Weistenin like folks after one errant click. It could help the discovery problem, but again, it would require substack to start rewarding notes makers and then you return to the Facebook/YouTube problem of creators bowing to the will of the platform holder.
So in terms of gravity, I would guess substack is closer to SA than Buzzfeed. The weakness is basically the uncertain future of a text based web. Image and video based social media has only been rising and it's not clear that there is a floor for how low text based content sharing can go. This has been a conversation since 2006 when YouTube was blowing up and TikTok is really pushing the limits of it.
I really appreciate the format of Substack and I wish that it had better discoverability because I would 100% engage with more writers; it's just a question of how to find them.
At least for me the Substack app on iPad is developing real gravity. It’s almost like an old school rss reader in that it brings together all my various Substack subscriptions in one handy place and has consistently been the second app I open in the morning after reading the Times. Yes, it’s driven by the individual writers I follow, particularly Yglesias as he writes every morning and I find his daily writing useful and informative, but at the same time I now follow enough newsletters that it consistently has interesting writing and is a place I affirmatively go on a daily basis. That said I’m also a weirdo who started using rss to structure my information diet in the early 2000s and never gave it up, so I may be completely unrepresentative.
I think in order for Substack to be sticky, it needs an all-you-can-eat subscription. I'm not going to wander the site just to hit paywall after paywall - that's frustrating. In a world where I automatically have access to hundreds of writers, though, I'd work a lot harder at finding more people I'm interested in.
It seems like 90% of substack discoverability exists outside of substack. But the email sign-ups are by far the best feature for monetizing readers. Unlike any social media site, getting a full article in a light email form on demand is way better than logging into a bloated app with a million more distractions. It helps atomize substack and makes the (frankly sometimes steep) cost of subscription feel more targeted. You pay money, you get articles and maybe podcasts sent directly to you.
I don't know if appifying substack works well. Notes sucks. It repeats weeks old posts and the dearth of content makes the algorithm so weak that I still can't get rid of Brett Weistenin like folks after one errant click. It could help the discovery problem, but again, it would require substack to start rewarding notes makers and then you return to the Facebook/YouTube problem of creators bowing to the will of the platform holder.
So in terms of gravity, I would guess substack is closer to SA than Buzzfeed. The weakness is basically the uncertain future of a text based web. Image and video based social media has only been rising and it's not clear that there is a floor for how low text based content sharing can go. This has been a conversation since 2006 when YouTube was blowing up and TikTok is really pushing the limits of it.
I really appreciate the format of Substack and I wish that it had better discoverability because I would 100% engage with more writers; it's just a question of how to find them.
I actually keep a Substack inbox tab open at all times in my browser. Of course, I'm a tab fiend who usually has 50-100 tabs open at all times...