Thursday State of the SubStacks: Walking the Tightrope Over the Attention-Economy Abyss

As app‑first feeds and social ephemera threaten the email/blog/tip‑jar core, VC incentives collide with public reason, the brittle economics of “#discoverability” make themselves felt, and it turns...

As app‑first feeds and social ephemera threaten the email/blog/tip‑jar core, VC incentives collide with public reason, the brittle economics of “#discoverability” make themselves felt, and it turns out the hard part is the mechanics of the business finding the sweet spot…

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Is this thing a serious and sustainable platform business, individual business model, and hence public-reason community?

On the plate we have:

Anne Trubek: On SubStack (sigh) <https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/on-substack-sigh>: ‘I am not a fan of the… owners…. I expect this platform to become increasingly unfriendly to newsletter writers like me… not chasing Big Scale… [the] Notes (social media-esque) part of Substack. En****tification…. I have tried to leave… and have stalled out, several times, for varying reasons…. Many writers here… making… a substantial portion of [a living]…. is an extraordinary accomplishment and godsend that they have been able to be sustain themselves through newsletters which, like blogs, have been historically well-nigh impossible to profit from…

vs.:

Hamish McKenzie: <https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-171083114>: ‘Patreon is spending big bucks to lure some Substack writers over to its platform, and some are taking the deal to escape the social features that drive their growth here. (They stay on Instagram, though.) Meanwhile, Patreon is spending that money because it’s trying to spin up the network effects that Substack has by… building social features….

Things we do to help writers who don’t have an existing audience: - Provide a multimedia publishing system that is completely free to use. - Give writers distribution to email, web, and an app, for no cost whatsoever. - Offer an discovery system that includes Notes, recommendations, search, leaderboards, and categories that have the potential to bring you subscribers, completely free of charge. - Publish and provide (free) educational resources that help writers figure out how to best use Substack and make the most of this new model. -Attract writers with large existing audiences to the network so that other writers might convert some of those people into their own subscribers

We have a ton more work to do, and it will never be enough, but we explicitly design Substack to help a new generation of voices emerge. Doesn’t mean that every one will succeed. But here they have a greater shot at building a sustainable media presence and business than anywhere else on the internet…

And:

a. natasha joukovsky: <https://substack.com/@joukovsky/note/c-173537147>: ‘I cannot understand—from a business perspective, mind you—why Substack seems to be prioritizing Notes ephemera over links to longform newsletters. The normal answer here—revenue-maximizing en****tification—simply doesn’t fit on a platform that makes its money through paid subscriptions. Substack’s incentives, as they so often tout, are seemingly aligned to writers’. Gotta wonder if ads are coming soon/what the play here is because the math isn’t mathing…

With a key red flag now appearing to be SubStack Notes <https://substack.com/home> and its associated chonky swol twitter-like feed:

And also on the plate is a note from Mills Baker about what the SubStack team is actually intending SubStack Notes, considered as a social-media feed, to be—a principal channel pushing discoverability:

Mills Baker: Rats from Rocks: ‘no plans for ads at all; there’s a dynamic balance issue with feed tuning that’ll sum to lurching ranking though:

• if you want more paid subs, you need more posts served AND more users;

• more users come from more engaging feed content (they visit more, stay longer, click on more posts, subscribe more)

• we goal on paid subs, so we push posts to the max, but at some point pushing all posts will trade off against post driven subscriptions, weirdly!

• eg if feed were all paywalled posts, people wouldn’t come on volume and subscriptions would decline; if it were no paywalled posts, or no posts at all, it would be pointless for us and writers and we’d make no money

it’s just a permanently messy tuning process with dynamic (and ultimately per user) targets…

As I understand it, the key to SubStack’s “Notes” algorithm is that it needs to be one that (i) does not maximize time-on-platform and leaves a bad taste afterwards in the mouths of those who engaged, but (ii) does maximize paid subscriptions to newsletters, and also (iii) leaves readers of “Notes” feeling informed, entertained, and having spent there time learning about interesting things to read.

The “how this works” and how you create this New Model Algorithm remains mysterious to me.

It is a social network, but not: SubStack has an app. Substack spends a lot of its team’s energy and time getting people to download and then use the app. The app is anchored by its feed. But SubStack is trying as hard as it can to hack the brains of those it attract in a different way. Mark Zuckerberg’s team tries to hack your brain so that you spend as much time as possible on-app, so your glued eyeballs can be sold to attention-seeking advertisers. The SubStack team is trying to optimize for the chain: download → view → discover → subscribe → pay. The desired end result for SubStack is a paid subscriber to somebody’s newsletter/ podcast. And there seeking that requires a substantially different feed than the eyeball-gluing maximize time in-app standard social-media feed.

But how, exactly?

In spite of attempts, enthusiastic attempts, by the Masters of SubStack to explain it to me, it remains opaque and mysterious.

The key here is #discoverability. I have written about this before:

• <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substacks-three-body-problem-teaserage>

• <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/i-see-the-substack-wars-have-started>

SubStack's Three-Body Problem: Teaserage, Patronage, & Premiumage Orbiting...

I See the SubStack Culture Wars Have Started Up Again

In the first, I argued that SubStack had a triple tension: to survive as a platform that people would wish to be on, it had to balance writers seeking income/control, readers wanting access/trust, and yet its funding investors wanting growth; with stability requiring resisting the ad-supported attention casino, while (somehow) still being trapped by the fact that it is not (yet) profitable without larger scale. My suggestion was: model mix of teaserage (samples), patronage (normalized tip jar), and premiumage (adjacent perks), treating them all as adjustable dials, not dogma. And somehow building a successful #discoverability layer as well. The hope was that SubStack could both prosper and enhance public reason by making it easier for thoughtful work to find and keep its audience. The fears were many, and—well—obvious.

In the second, I noted the critics arguing the platform’s branding and discovery layer were a mirage, pushing writers toward walled‑garden, attention‑harvesting behaviors, and yet somehow there is no large-scale exit. Alternatives lack features, reach, or marketing, making migration costly and—unless subsidized—uneconomic. Unwilling former SubStacker Ana Marie Cox <https://newsletter.anamariecox.com/archive/substack-did-not-see-that-coming/> says that she “do[es] not judge” those who feel “constrained by the lack of infrastructure or certainty offered by other options” and yet calls for some to “make some demand” so that then the “alternatives will expand with demand”.

What do I have to add now?

Well, first, as Hamish noted above those expanding alternatives are expanding by pushing themselves to become more like SubStack—#discoverability layer, “spending big bucks to lure some Substack writers” to try to get the network flywheel going, and the dreaded #social-media features.

Now do not get me wrong: I grok where natasha and others are coming from. And while I must admit that I am somewhat cynically amused at Patreon’s offering successful SubStackers subsidies and trying to build a #discoverability layer of its own, while still positioning itself as the crunchy (and much lower fee) alternative; I feel the gravitational pull as they do.

What they want is a decentralized system of individual writers writing for occasions semi-regularly on their own websites, all linked together by discovering and referring and boosting one another as they argue and inform, and perhaps it will be a side-hustle for some and a source of resources to keep body-and-soul together for others. Well, so do I. I want that too.

But this is not our first rodeo:

And as unwilling former SubStacker Ana Marie Cox wrote <https://newsletter.anamariecox.com/archive/substack-did-not-see-that-coming/>: “Substack is still the easiest option for creating a newsletter, especially for creators without the time, tools, or tech fluency to self-host…” She then goes on to (a) call for a functional discoverability layer, (b) while rejecting the one we have, and (c) being not fully conscious of the tension here:

Newsletters aren’t the answer to a disintegrating media ecosphere. We need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing. The idea that we can hustle our way to safety will only push us closer to collapse. We don’t need better tools as much as we need each other…. Ignore [SubStack’s]… posturing about free speech…. They’re leaning… into audience capture… audio, video, short-form posts, “discoverability”… keep[ing] readers in their app listening, watching, interacting—anything but reading newsletters in their inbox as God intended…

Behind all this, of course, is the perception and the reality of the “Nazi Bar” problem. I accept that if you add any discovery layer to Substack—to any internet network—that is more than a simple reliance on individual writer shout-outs, and you will very quickly run into a problem. Given: (a) The honchos of SubStack have a very different view of where the Overton Window should properly be than I do, (b) my view of where it should be is substantially to the right of the average writer’s, (c) the extraordinary variance of human opinion, and (d) the internet brings the far-away and extreme to your face immediately. Then: The attempt to cast a broad net, as far as recommendations for what people should read, winds up, remarkably quickly, in two places at once:

• First the system suggests that people who read my stuff might also like to read writers who are very eager to classify others as a blight on humanity who need to be removed from the gene pool, humanely (or not) not.

• Second, and at the same time, it also winds up recommending people who are very eager, for what seem like minor failures to toe some line, to drive others out in the wilderness to be food for Azazel.

I find that the “Nazi Bar” problem is much worse than the “two-minute hate for small-scale trespass problem”, both because it is a much bigger problem in American discourse today, and because the right-wing lean of the SubStack honchos makes them vulnerable to it. One of their big backers is, after all, on record as telling Rick Perlstein that “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet…”, they are already deep under the water.

But remember when the web was open roads—or, rather, a place where we did not even need roads—and not tollbooths?

However, I do not see any realistic hope other than the path SubStack is trying to be on. Treat paywalls, prices, and perks as adjustable dials, not doctrine. Use teaserage to provide samples of work, patronage to fund a large commons of freely available valuable information, and premiumage to nudge high‑value readers to pony up. Accept that wide‑net discovery is brittle; invest instead in writer‑to‑writer recommendations, guest posts, and reader networks. And avoid being influenced by venture capital. With product discipline and a commitment to public reason, Substack might be able to remain on its tightrope above the attention‑economy abyss, sustaining thoughtful work and a better form of public reason.

I would like to see a lot more of what SubStack is doing with its 10% of the money made public. I want them to tell us:

1. How are they trying to pursue non-engagement algorithmic goals, and where are the dashboards about how it is working?

2. What do the data show are the most successful author stategies for providing effective teaserage with integrity?

3. What do the data show about moving back to or providing a more balanced model with a component of patronage as public good via normalizing the tip jar by framing a free commons as civic infrastructure?

4. And what do the data show for premiumage without cannibalization? How can writers offer adjacent value—AMAs, seminars, annotated bibliographies, early drafts—designed to deepen relationships rather than replace the open core? Does “premium” convert high‑intent readers or just shift time away from public posts?

5. Or is the key oscillation as policy tool? What do the data show about month-by-month dialing up-and-down off paywalls, prices, and perks to different reader segments?

6. Plus I really do want to see:

   1. Pilot reader‑friendly granularity—buy‑one post, monthly bundles, or swap‑able slots across 5 paid newsletters.

   2. Commons funding mechanisms—opt‑in levies, donor pools, institutional sponsors to stabilize public‑good analysis, teaching, and discourse without attention hacks.

   3. Cost transparency for writers—published total-cost-of-ownership comparisons.

   4. Algorithmic windows that explicitly lift longform links over Notes ephemera.

   5. Recognition of and accomodation to reader time budgets—tools to cap per‑day feed time, schedule digest delivery, and highlight “must‑read” posts to serve selective readers rather than fighting them.

   6. A public algorithmic constitution: Publish the Notes ranking principles, the variables, and their weights at a high level; commit to change logs and experiments with scrutable goals (paid subs, longform CTR, reader satisfaction rather than session length).

   7. Composer tools for Notes-to-newsletter: “expand this Note into a newsletter post” workflows, nudging ephemera into longform while tracking conversion impact vs. pure Notes engagement.

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#discoverability
#substack
#thursday-state-of-the-substacks
#public-reason
#walking-the-tightrope-over-the-attention-economy-abyss