We've been in a world for 10-15 years where recommendation systems needed tons of data and tons of compute. That drove things towards a) large user bases and b) largely free-to-use, ad-supported models (it was only very expensive to produce audio and video where subscription based models worked, a la Spotify and Netflix).

The resurgence of long-form text (Substack) definitely seems to rhyme with the earlier days of blogs and forums. It does seem like people still like to write things and put them on the web. What's interesting is whether the technological paradigm has changed enough to where you could get interesting get discovery without getting mired in the slop of social media.