What To Do With Substack?

What to do with Substack? The endless variety of posts by people who want their words to reach the outside world is exciting and inspiring but also a bit overwhelming. There really isn't a lot of curation beyond what we do ourselves to choose what we'll see in our feeds. This is not only challenging and a bit frustrating when we bite off more than we can chew. It's also not particularly organized. I had tried to organize my own posts by creating sections of the Substack. A reader, I thought, could go to one at a time or subscribe to only those that interested them. This does not exist for the stuff I read on Substack, though. There are a few people who have similarly tried to separate their posts into sections. I think I first noticed this on Matt Taibbi's page. But I don't really use his sections. They seem to be more for Matt than for me, and I suspected mine were similar.

The biggest problem I'm having with Substack, though, is the endless present. As a newspaper or magazine page that shows the most recent posts in chronological order (either on my own page or in a feed of everything to which I subscribe), there's really not a big chance to develop a sense of continuity or of a linked body of work that emerges over time. I think this is a major flaw, at least for what I'm hoping to do. A newsfeed may be exactly the wrong format. And the wrong metaphor.

I have really been dragging my feet about reopening my own domain and managing my own website. It's a lot of work and a big time commitment. Might be unavoidable, though. The closest thing I have found, so far, has been Obsidian Publish, which allows me to create a Wiki-like web of linked pages that give me a chance to explore related ideas or build up a set of connected bits of data that will help me build something. Is the type of thing I'm doing, adding names of people to a web of plutocrats and muckrakers, some type of "world-building"? Similarly, as I continue to explore themes and interpretations, coming at questions from different angles at different times, would it help me to link these and be able to work with this web as it evolves? And then invite readers to experience the same sort of discovery?

Over the summer, I spent a lot of time posting a lot of content to Substack. My idea had been that at some point readers might want to start following these threads in the web. But they're not particularly easy to follow. Yes, I suppose I can manually create links in a post that would take a reader to another post. But the structure doesn't really lend itself. The posts and links still seem to present themselves as free-standing little essays, rather than as tiles in a mosaic. It might be helpful to have a tool that showed the tiles.

Ideally, this might be something like Scrintal. If it wasn't so slow and if the data didn't live on a server in the EU. I'm pretty sure I want to control my own data and I don't want to do my thinking on a tool where I don't own the data. I might be okay presenting the output that way, I suppose. But maybe I can figure out how to do it well using Obsidian Publish. My Obsidian vaults at this point include folders for topics. It might not be that different to have folders for outputs. Much of the output, especially in the "under construction" phase, could be offered free to subscribers. Maybe it would move to a "contributing subscriber" status when something like a course was completed and ready to roll out. Or maybe I'll be able to figure out how to "tease" the in-depth content with a subset of it that will serve as an effective advertisement. Maybe that's what I should be putting onto Substack?

One of the things I learned in the first couple of weeks of teaching the same content (US History 2) across four different sections is that I need to be more methodical about making lists of things I want to say in each section and then checking them off as I go. So I don't get close to the end of the week and find it difficult to remember if I've said something to the particular group I happen to be in front of? (this is exacerbated by seeing some sections multiple times in the week!) I had resisted the idea of having a set of "learning objectives" for each unit of the course, but this might end up amounting to the same sort of thing -- although it would be for a better reason. What it would do for me, though, would be to create a set of things I could talk about when advertising each episode.

This train of thought returns me to the question of segregating my feeds. Does it make sense to have a Lifelong Learners published vault and a separate MakingHistory vault? And how to market those? I think it's always a good idea for me to do things that I roll out as works-in-progress. But maybe I should even lean into that. The Archive thing in Substack is pretty worthless (should I poll readers on this?). I don't get the sense that anyone really searches in Substack and does deep dives. I have intended to do that with people I follow, and I've never really done it. The medium pushes you back into the "what's current today" mindset. So maybe I should go with that flow and give up on trying to put complicated or complexly-linked stuff up on Substack at all. Maybe I should reserve it for short descriptions of deeper dives I do on my sites. That would mean I might start actually removing "Archived" stuff from Substack and posting links for contributing subscribers to the stuff on my own sites. That would also potentially get me beyond the types of situations I've run into recently, such as when Tim couldn't find where the latest Book Club video was posted -- which I assume also means he finds it difficult to access archives of those videos. I may be able to build these folders gradually, which would give readers a reason to continue tuning in. The web would fill in with well-linked old stuff at the same time I was adding new.

This has been a bit rambling. I think it's beginning to make sense to me, though. So people should start seeing changes soon. I'm currently about an hour from home at 34,000 feet in a plane returning from my weekend visit to Pittsburgh. With that behind me, I have a block of time to focus on work until my other daughter and her husband visit me from New Hampshire in late October. Then a month later I'll be going to CA for Thanksgiving. Hopefully, I'll have a lot done by then!