Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least in line with the rest of the net.