Building a Substack Community?

Day 114 of the Journey

Day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday, for much of America. I've finished pruning my feed. Got it down to about 157 blogs. I'm looking forward to actually being able to pay a little bit closer attention to these. Not certain I won't add or subtract a few more or less, here and there. But this feels a little less out of control.

One of the reasons I did the prune was that I wanted to start using Substack as a place to carry on conversations with people interested in topics similar to those I'm pursuing. It strikes me that it would be unfortunate if Substack became only an alternative news platform. I think it's valuable and important that it facilitates voices from outside the mainstream sharing news and commentary. But as important as that is, I think it's secondary to helping people find or create communities around shared interests, rather than just consuming media with a different point of view.

So I'll be trying to not only read the stuff that appears in my (now hopefully more manageable) feed, but to engage with it. Make notes, comment, respond with my own posts. As that develops, I'll probably also begin shifting my subscription level from free to paid in the ones I really get ongoing value from. I already pay a handful of bloggers. I think it makes sense to support thought-provoking content online just as I would if I was buying a book. It occurs to me that I have a sort-of automatic reaction to begin a paid subscription if someone who starts paying me also has a Substack. I don’t think everyone has to share this approach. Some people, I suppose, aren’t here for a community so much as a market. Over time I suppose this might result in a lot of the same dollars flying around between bloggers and enriching only Substack itself. But even if the net income is reduced, I think it's an important acknowledgment that people actually value both the support they're getting from other bloggers and the work we're all putting into this. Seems like it could be the beginning of some kind of virtuous circle.

In any case, the thing I'm looking forward to mostly is paying more attention to cool stuff people are producing and beginning a conversation that's based on shared interests rather than random factors like geography. Some of the most rewarding results of my first several months back on Substack have been discovering people like

Ruairí Nolan

,

Annette Laing

,

Andrew Chapman

,

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

, or

Henry Oliver

, whose work I would never have known about, despite the overlap in many of our interests. Looking forward to more discoveries and interactions like these in 2024!