7 reasons why Substack is the cure for information disorder
7 reasons why Substack is the cure for information disorder
The Substack movement is just like the blogging revolution, but this time with a business plan.
Blogs were great. Until social sites like Facebook ruined them.
What happened with blogging is that the best bloggers poured their hearts and souls into writing fantastic, world-class content, only to have Facebook get all the money for their work.
The only way to promote a blog became to link to it from social media. Then the social sites would deliver that link to a fraction of your "followers" — unless, of course, algorithms chose the post for viral success, in which case many people who were not followers would get it. Sites like Facebook would be the king-makers, and keep all the money.
A blog is not, as commonly believed, anything that is published using software or services marketed to bloggers. It is, by definition (specifically Dave Winer's definition, which I endorse), "the unedited voice of a person."
A publication is a collaborative effort.
An editor, by definition, not only polishes prose, but also acts as a censor, a curator, a director and imposes standards on a piece as a representative of a larger organization.
With a publication, there are many people involved. There are editors, advertisers, publishers, boards of directors, possibly shareholders. All are stakeholders, at least theoretically, in what appears on the page.
With a blog, it's just you and me.
Consider Forbes’ latest initiative. Forbes this week announced the launch of a newsletter platform that appears to be basically Substack, but an alternative that favors Forbes writers and Forbes content.
The plan is to hire up to 30 writers who already have large social media followings to seed the service. They'll then invite their contributors (which number as many as 2,800) to launch their own newsletters.
Subscription revenue will be split 50-50 with writers, plus writers will get some unknown portion of advertising revenue. Another difference is that Forbes newsletters will be edited and fact-checked. (By contrast, Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue and writers keep the rest.)
My friend, former Houston Chronicle tech writer Dwight Silverman, is slated to write a newsletter for the launch, as are a smattering of other writers in other fields.
What Forbes is proposing is the opposite of Substack in one key respect.
A Substack newsletter is a blog. A Forbes newsletter is a publication. There’s nothing wrong with publications. But Forbes’ newsletter service can and will never be like Substack.
The Substack phenomenon is usually shown from the writer's point of view. We’ve all read the stories. Some journalist quits their salaried job and becomes a kind of content entrepreneur, actually making a living by subscriptions.
But the real revolution is among readers. Intelligent, thoughtful readers are fed up with algorithmically controlled content. Companies like Facebook are in the business of building software machines that tell us all what to read — what to think and to know.
This system is conducting an experiment on all users at all times, dangling different kinds of content in front of millions of people to see what they share, click on, linger over, like and comment upon. All that engagement data is instantly fed back into the machine to inform what the next batch of users see.
Inevitably, the result favors the salacious, anger-producing, prurient and frivolous. On social media, what we get are the pellets in a hamster experiment based on our compulsion, our most basic impulses. And the more we let social media push our buttons, the dumber the content gets. The dumber we get.
Algorithms can be gamed. Propagandists, opportunists and exploiters will always find a way to push those buttons, leading to widespread disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies. Legitimate publications have to compete with the news feed "hackers" by choosing salacious content and clickbait headlines. Everything gets dumbed down.
Call it information disorder, information pollution or just plain content garbage — social media has destroyed public understanding and discourse.
What intelligent readers actually want is to decide in advance what and whom to read, and let that content arrive without machine or even human filtering, censorship or control. And without all those time-wasting, mind-taxing ads.
For the past 20 years, online advertising has gotten completely out of control. It's not uncommon to click on a link to a story, only to be assaulted by ads on top of ads on top of ads. Instead of reading the story, the reader starts wrestling with the page, trying to find the hidden X that closes windows, pushing down encroaching promotions and figuring out how to stop auto-playing videos.
Yes, content must be monetized. But for many people (including myself), it's preferable to pay with a subscription fee than to pay with the pollution of one's own mind. In other words, we've come to intuit that our time and attention is valuable and finite, and not something to be endlessly sacrificed for "free" content.
Substack is a beautiful thing. It solves the biggest problem readers have and the biggest problem writers have.
Here are the 7 reasons why Substack is the cure for information disorder. Substack:
delivers choice content without advertising
lets you choose what you read based on your criteria, rather than letting Facebook choose based on Facebook's criteria
improves the quality of journalism and writing because through monetization it frees great writers from depending on big publishing companies (and their agendas) to make a living
incentivizes quality, not clickbait
turns the reader into a partner and collaborator, instead of a passive "consumer"
enables readers to collectively choose the content that succeeds in the marketplace of ideas
offers writers a way to make a living without selling out
In short, Substack is the cure for information disorder — at least for the readers able to escape from the social media content trap.