Substack fascinates me as a platform particularly because it bothers me
Substack fascinates me as a platform particularly because it bothers me. There is a type of writer who writes on Substack, and a type of essay that people publish there (yes, I know it’s not a monolith, but hear me out for a second) and it is its own ecosystem for having conversations, and it just seems to encourage a very reactive and online form of essay writing, like if you took Twitter and made it longform and more polished but you could also choose to paywall your more controversial tweets.
And I think on some level that’s why I have such an aversion to that platform. What’s the point of long-form writing if it’s getting social mediaified and it’s less of a place to explore the ideas that have been bothering you?
I wonder if there were any filmmakers who felt this way about YouTube back when it was starting to become what it is now. YouTube was a video sharing site akin to Vimeo until it wasn’t and became something else, in the same way that Substack was a newsletter platform until it wasn’t and became something else.
Of, course, you can technically still use YouTube as a video sharing site. But we all understand a “YouTube video” to be something distinct from a video that happens to be shared on YouTube.
And now I’m watching the “Substack essay” emerge as a format, and I guess I feel weird about it because it’s a shift and also kinda feels like a watering down of variety in some way, and it feels weird to be watching new writers essentially learn how to write by writing on Substack.