Substack Did Not See That Coming

Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I’m not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold—especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.

This piece was really interesting to me because of the numbers. If you’ve worked in tech or around start ups you know the numbers presented here aren’t good. Substack is trying everything to keep people on their platform (what other platforms does that sound like?) and yet newsletters are things you get in your inbox and I agree, that creates an intimacy that all the other things Substack is doing can’t recreate. I’ve been incredibly disappointed over the past months to see so many folks whose work I admire starting “a Substack” as they say. There are alternatives, it’s possible, and if any of the people I really enjoy reading were to do that, I might consider a paying subscription, but not as long as they’re on Substack.