(2020-11-24) App Div Stud How Substack Became Milquetoast

Applied Divinity Studies: How Substack Became Milquetoast. How often have you gone back to read an old edition of your favorite newsletter? Why bother when you’ll have a new one tomorrow? Has anything you’ve read recently stuck with you? And if so, has it stuck in your heart like your first kiss, or merely to your tongue, not poor or foul, spicy or sweet, but bland, boring, milquetoast.

Nintil notes: RSS is a civilized way of following updates from disparate sites you like, aggregating them in one central place that's separate from the mailbox where they can be saved to be read later, organized by source if need be. Newsletters —stuff that hits your inbox— strike me as barbaric... This all said, there is something to be said for being paid to write and it's good that there exist platforms that allow people interested in publishing under that model

Top substack writers all have a clear focus. The Dispatch writes about politics, Matt Stoller writes about monopolies, Bill Bishop covers China. Isn’t this normal? After all, no writer can be expected to cover every topic. In an age of disaggregation, we should read from experts instead of casual polymaths.

And yet, the apparent normality obscures its historical peculiarity. Consider SlateStarCodex, one of the most popular blogs in a pre-Substack era. It had posts ranging from political science fiction, to pharmacology, to artificial intelligence, to media economics. That’s not a selective assortment, it’s his last few posts in chronological order

The problem is not merely homogeneity of topic, but homogeneity of substance. If you have to publish a newsletter every week, you don’t have the room or incentive to take risks.

In financial terms, blog posts have asymmetric returns with capped downside but unlimited upside. If you write a bad post it won’t get shared and no one will see it. If you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you’re a genius

That dynamic is also good for readers. If a piece is bold but wrong, you can just close the tab. If it’s bold but right, you’ve hit a gold mine.

In contrast, every single edition of a newsletter is delivered to every single reader, and since a lot of it is paywalled, there’s little potential virality

like pop-music, pop-science and all other pop-culture, pop-writing can only appeal to the largest common denominator. Even if the author and readers are interesting people in isolation, aggregation forces this blob of individuals into a milquetoast morass

homogeneity within newsletters might not sound like such a crime. If each person is an expert in their domain

Except that structural forces also ensure a homogeneity across newsletters, ensuring that you never read anything too original.

Subcultures allow for an escape from status as a zero-sum game. If you’re the king of your own world, you don’t feel bad for being at the bottom of someone else’s social ladder

In contrast, Substack totally violates Social Fog of War by instituting a global leader board

Homogeneity of Style

A Substack newsletter can have an About page, but that’s it. There will never be anything like Nadia’s notes which are a regularly updated half-baked stream of consciousness, or Guzey’s list of Tweets or even Nintil’s categories. And they certainly won’t have Gwern’s link preview on hover, or sidenotes.

These aren’t just good features, they’re forms of self-expression, and even more critically, variations on the medium that creates the message, and in the extreme case, media for thinking the unthinkable

Homogeneity Across Time

It’s better for authors to think persistently and write occasionally than the other way around. But on Substack, you’re paid monthly, creating pressure to churn out regular updates

In the past, you might have spent 10 hours reading a book that took 4 years to research and write, a 3500x multiple on time! Today, a newsletter that publishes M-F and takes 30 minutes to read only provides a 67x multiple.

What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction which is remembered.

Substack isn’t going away. The internet had the last 20 years to figure out sustainable monetization for blogs, and largely failed.

With regards to future growth, the biggest risk is that the mainstream population continues to read mainstream journals, and Substack never crosses the chasm.

The second biggest risk is that at some point, all the biggest authors will leave.

*In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible pricing for writers at scale, and operate as a cheap service for small writers while benefiting from the upside of the huge successes.

These are both great options, the problem is that they’re mutually exclusive.*

Epilogue: The Dogmatic Bits

Substack may be printing money, but it’s totally out of ideas.

They’ve ventured into fellowships and legal support, but it’s difficult to get through the claim “to accelerate the advent of this new media economy, we’ll build increasingly powerful tools to help readers” without feeling cynical. It’s been a year. They have 44 employees. They raised $15,000,000. Name literally one “powerful tool” built for readers.

The most damning thing about Substack is not any of these theoretical structural mechanics, it’s the easier more intuitive understanding that nothing great will be written here

It follows an unwritten contract between each party–I will not try too hard to writing anything serious, you will not try too hard to understand my writing, and both of us will be happier for it

it is still worth speaking the obvious truth that having someone who is not your spouse feed their thoughts to you 5-days-a-week, thoughts that they themselves have only had a day to work on, thoughts which would likely go refined or unexpressed in a publication with longer-time horizons, is probably not good for your brain. That’s not a “weekly update”, it’s a parasocial relationship, it’s the same poison you get from every other one-sided social media platform

How often have you gone back to read an old edition of your favorite newsletter? Why bother when you’ll have a new one tomorrow? Has anything you’ve read recently stuck with you? And if so, has it stuck in your heart like your first kiss, or merely to your tongue, not poor or foul, spicy or sweet, but bland, boring, milquetoast.