It's hard to read this without thinking of Randall Munro's take back in 2007 which looked back at the glory days of the blogosphere. Even back then, we all knew he had nailed it. Sorry, no red capes, goggles or high altitude balloons.
I think this is basically right, as someone who was a minor blogospheric figure starting in 2002 and who started to lose energy and enthusiasm around 2014 for my blog, which was at that point one of the survivors of the vanished world. The interesting thing that Substack proved, sort of, is that there's still a lot of will to write in public out there, combined with podcasts and other media. I think the downside of Substack's attempt to push and groom the small fry and hobbyists into having enough of a subscriber base to pay off Substack is that they've relentlessly pushed a lot of people towards narrowcasting on the grounds that this is the only way to cultivate a readership, which makes Substack's expressive space fairly different than the old blogosphere.
I'd add that the structural incentives for paid substacks are, on the whole, just kind of BAD. I'm thinking in particular of Charlie Warzel's insight that he "did not do enough grievance blogging" to really succeed as a substacker. https://warzel.substack.com/p/galaxy-brain-is-moving
The sidebar advertising economy incentivized a lot of back-and-forth linking and probably encouraged burnout by pushing bloggers to write too many posts per day or week. But the substack subscription economy seems to really reward shitty-internet-drama in a way that (IMO) has amplified the worst habits of several prominent substackers.
It's hard to read this without thinking of Randall Munro's take back in 2007 which looked back at the glory days of the blogosphere. Even back then, we all knew he had nailed it. Sorry, no red capes, goggles or high altitude balloons.
https://xkcd.com/239/
Hi Dave, mentioned you on Medium :D https://medium.com/online-writing-101/old-school-blogging-is-back-and-better-than-ever-thanks-to-substack-7fec285e3e91
Fits perfectly to yesterday's Substack topic
I think this is basically right, as someone who was a minor blogospheric figure starting in 2002 and who started to lose energy and enthusiasm around 2014 for my blog, which was at that point one of the survivors of the vanished world. The interesting thing that Substack proved, sort of, is that there's still a lot of will to write in public out there, combined with podcasts and other media. I think the downside of Substack's attempt to push and groom the small fry and hobbyists into having enough of a subscriber base to pay off Substack is that they've relentlessly pushed a lot of people towards narrowcasting on the grounds that this is the only way to cultivate a readership, which makes Substack's expressive space fairly different than the old blogosphere.
I'd add that the structural incentives for paid substacks are, on the whole, just kind of BAD. I'm thinking in particular of Charlie Warzel's insight that he "did not do enough grievance blogging" to really succeed as a substacker. https://warzel.substack.com/p/galaxy-brain-is-moving
The sidebar advertising economy incentivized a lot of back-and-forth linking and probably encouraged burnout by pushing bloggers to write too many posts per day or week. But the substack subscription economy seems to really reward shitty-internet-drama in a way that (IMO) has amplified the worst habits of several prominent substackers.
Well, I'm not a good case for "too many posts a day", but that's partly because I'm using this as a form of writing discipline.
The problem of incentivizing attention is bigger than substack, though.
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