Dear Substack: Quit Sending Me Your Corporate Propaganda
empathynovel.substack.com
empathynovel.substack.com
Here are some ways this author is misguided:
- "Appeal to emotion is bad": No, it's a totally valid business strategy. Literally all good marketing (Apple billboards, etc) is appeal to emotion. Sure, maybe you're "above" that, but many people aren't. Lots of people want to feel like they're a part of something instead of just being an emotionless business robot.
- "Substack relies entirely on external traffic": If I remember correctly, Substack has said that traffic from Twitter is ~2% of their inbound traffic. I could be wrong though. Also, so what?
- "pay hundreds of dollars per year to read their goddamn blogs" - Substack is literally mostly free. What is this guy on about?
Honestly it seems like a guy who didn't see any personal success on Substack maybe because his writing (and logic) aren't superb, then received a poorly-timed email from Substack and decided to vent about it.
But are the posts worth recommending? His posts are all snippets of some sort of book (or play?) that he's writing. Example - his latest post is titled "Empathy No. 123 01/11/03, Roderick bedrm. 2:00 PM (approx)". It's a few sentences of dialog that have zero context. Even if these posts were recommended, what would you guess the clickthrough rate for a title like that is? I'd say that Substack's recommendation algorithm is doing just fine not recommending these posts.
Sure, Substack could probably do better at discovery. But there are other possible explanations for "nobody's reading my writing" than simply "Substack sucks".
FWIW this is unlikely to have any correlation to their total inbound traffic, but moreso to demonstrate that Twitter itself is notoriously bad at generating any outbound traffic (from Twitter to anything) itself. I was actually surprised that the author mentioned Twitter in their list of referrals period for this reason.
It was known by advertisers for ages that Twitter was a poor source of click-throughs but when Twitter started showing view metrics on tweets, everyone started realizing the click-through rates on links were abysmal compared to other social media sites. It's like Tiktok, you're consuming short bytes of content, you stay there to continue consuming short bytes of content. You don't leave to go read a long [whatever].
It amazes me how much energy some people waste by packaging their personal grievances as "influential" blog posts.
They just don't know it yet.
You can see this dilemma first hand in that email they spammed everyone with today. It starts by saying:
"Unlike most other online media platforms, we don’t seek to lock our customers into a walled garden by controlling their relationship with their audience"
Yet, at the end of the same email they tout the benefits of their walled garden and customer lock-in:
"37% of my paying subscribers had existing Substack accounts. 27% had saved credit cards on the Substack system, which made it a one-click experience to sign up for my paid newsletter. 11% came from platform features like Substack leaderboards, recommendations, or promotions."
So which is it? Are you an open platform, or are you a network effects business pedaling access to that network for a 10% cut?
The evidence is clear when you look under the hood. Substack won't allow you to recommend any non-Substack publication on their growth widgets. They try to get readers to download the Substack app to fully own the eyeballs that creators bring them. They've even launched a Twitter competitor. They're not building some non-profit open protocol here...and that's okay! Let's just stop pretending otherwise.
Personally, I think Substack should lean fully into becoming the next Twitter and stop trying to play the "good guy" card. Shut off custom domains and fully own the traffic like they're trying to do anyways. If they were to lean into the walled-garden social aspects, maybe the platform wouldn't have looked so rudderless to investors and they wouldn't have failed to raise their last round.
In this case the movement of compensating independent writers is quite a noble one I can get behind.
This can of course be cynically exploited by corporates, but I don’t if it’s done with authenticity then i dont find it to offensive.
I thought it was useful to point out because it highlights the way that overly positive messaging comes off to people who aren’t seeing success with your tools.
I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I think he raises some very valid points about getting too high on your own supply.
In the end it leads to Twitter-style enshitification as opposed to Facebook or Google-style enshitification because it is not a matter of a greedy company feeling pressured to take more but rather a matter of a “situation that can’t go on won’t.”
Myself I developed a paid API gateway (oddly commercial API gateways that bribe bloggers to spam spam spam to promote themselves and have a huge marketing budget offer every feature other than charging to access your API) and an email newsletter script that ran serverless in AWS. Both have run for years without me looking at them. If they had a baby that would be a substack replacement.
Quite a few ‘creator economy’ types who have had problems with the big platforms have struck out on their own like this guy
$1M means $100k in Substack take, how much of a team are you going to buy for that? Yes, you might be able to contract a team to set you up for less than that, but you might also not know what you're doing and contract a team that wastes $50k and doesn't deliver.
The way the posts end up arranged makes it actively difficult to get to the beginning and figure out what's going on, especially with indistinguishable titles.
I don't think the same could be said of anyone on clubhouse.