Substack Rant

I’m going to take a moment out of my morning to complain about Substack, and then I’m almost certainly going to transfer this from my journal to my Substack. My beef is not that the site is “experiencing technical problems” this morning. That’s a minor inconvenience and something that is inevitably going to happen to smaller sites, and may be even more likely when the site becomes inconvenient to the major platforms that control access and bandwidth on the “free internet”. Serious journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald announced within the last few days that they are returning to a much more serious focus on investigative work on Substack, at the same time the Washington Post apparently gutted its newsroom. Is it just a coincidence that Substack, which probably hosts its pages on Amazon Web Services, can’t load pages?

But beyond that, there are several ways Substack has sabotaged itself. I’m glad Taibbi and Greenwald are back and I’ll gladly pay a subscription fee to read their stuff. But that business model, which has been touted as a path toward self-employment for authors, is really not realistic. I wish is was and I’ve written about this in the past as it relates to my own Substacks. But even that promotion of a pipe-dream to aspiring writers isn’t my big beef today.

My issue is that it’s nearly impossible to find anything on Substack! The interface does NOT promote discovery. It’s actually even difficult to find things you already know about! For example, this morning I wanted to check in with Racket News and with Greenwald’s site, which I assume is either going to be called Glenn Greenwald or System Update. Wasn’t able to get to either in a search. Maybe that’s a function of the technical difficulties? But the feed makes no sense either.

I can find a page that supposedly feeds me recent posts from people to whom I subscribe. I notice there’s a tab where I can select only to see posts from people with whom I have paid subscriptions. That’s helpful. But the effect of the long scroll of posts, arranged in order of recency, was immediately to convince me to unsubscribe from several people, just to prevent their posts from making it impossible for me to find what I’d actually like to read!

As a reader, I had imagined subscription as a way of indicating to an author that I am interested in their stuff, As an author, I had hoped free subscription would become a path to support for my writing through paid subscription. Be that as it may, what does subscription even mean anymore? My subscription base has grown slowly over the last couple of years to a little over 500. I suspect it would be much higher, if Substack hadn’t introduced an intermediate level, “Follower”. What does that mean? When will I see content from people I follow rather than from those to whom I subscribe?

I get “follows” every day, and had been in the habit of automatically hitting the “follow back” button. Typically nowadays, this results in an instant message of the type I’ve come to associate as “honey-bot”. An apparently attractive, typically foreign woman (based on profile photo) who wants to have a personal convo with me. Really, Substack? That’s the new feature-set you want to implement?

I’m going to continue posting some of my content on Substack, because that’s where some of the people who are interested in my stuff have gotten into the habit of finding me. I’d suggest to them, though, that they might want to also bookmark my personal website and blog, zibaldone.net, where it will be easier to locate my content and there will be more of it available in the long run. I’ll post EVERYTHING there and a subset of that on Substack.