My Substack frustration
If you don't know where you're going...
I have a problem. OK, I have more than one, but let’s focus on the one relevant to this post.
One of the first projects of Jordan Peterson, after bursting onto the public stage, was a web-site offering of a personality test for a modest fee.
These are my results:
My lowest score is agreeableness.
To put it simply, I am not a nice person. Just ask my sister. I am not ashamed of it, I even wrote a post justifying it: “F… nice, be good”.
I could explain it, my childhood and all that, but that does not change the fact that I do not know how to praise. I never learned how to do it. The best I can offer in its place is engaged criticism. Showing that I understand and care about an idea is the greatest praise I can offer. Offering constructive criticism should be seen as a sign of understanding and care. The more I like something, the more likely I am to find some faults in it.
Being rejected or being dismissed may hurt, but what is the worst, is being ignored. Asking a direct question and not even getting a f… off for an answer. Which is what I (didn’t even) get/got on my first or on my second attempt trying to engage Substack (and you all) in a serious and meaningful conversation. If this third attempt will also land with the thud of a piece of meat on the floor, I will have to reexamine the point of everything I am doing around here.
So please, try to understand my frustration, the weight of my disagreeable personality, my background of being an into-your-face blunt Hungarian and focus on the positive, which is:
Anything I am bitching about could easily be fixed
And “…what a wonderful world this would be”
But at this point, I have so much to bitch about, dream of and wish for, that I should present that list in a separate post. This one is about perceptions.
The first and biggest one of my problems is that there seems to be no practical, structured place to ask questions, and find answers.
It is said, that for a child with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It seems, that for Substack, everything looks like a blog post, not matter how inappropriate it is for the task. I spent several hours on several Thursdays trying to find enlightenment on the Writer office hours of @on.substack, without ever finding anything truly useful. When someone is asking for a feature, or an actual problem, the best he can hope for is a promise that the suggestion/question will be passed on. I never saw a problem resolved. What I saw was lot of feel-good support, encouragement and lotsa, lotsa Kumbaya. But that is not what I and (I hope) WE need.
I started writing this post over a month ago, but stopped several times thinking that maybe I am the problem. I am just too stupid to find the answers, so I kept searching. I did not find what I was looking for. I spent most of my working life in IT support and I can tell you that what I see does not measure up. But I will give you the details in my next post. They are the small problems. I need to start with the big ones.
What I miss the most in Substack today are a vision, strategy and resolve.
The lack of vision
We are living in momentous times with an incredible spectrum of potential outcomes from a brilliantly liberating future to totalitarian self destruction. It is more significant than the Guttenberg revolution and the enlightenment combined.
The very way we acquire and disseminate knowledge is changing.
The legacy media is dying. Social media is changing. Substack is standing in the middle of these changes with incredible potentials and quite a bit of responsibility. The business model – moving away from the blunt advertising-based model of the legacy media and the data-harvesting advertising model of social media – is an important first step, but I wouldn’t call it visionary. It is still just an opportunity driven idea.
It is a limited answer to one symptom of the dying media platforms. Finding a better way of making money on the dissemination of the intangible.
What Substack needs the most is a vision. Everything Elon Musk is doing is driven by his vision of the future. Any and every business needs that. Musk is always behind with his promises and expectations, but nobody can say that he does not know where he is going.
Amazon started out with a database of books. Now it is the world’s biggest retailer of just about ANYTHING.
Substack has blogs, but it could easily become the new face of publishing.
As long as it can understand its first principles and have a destination in mind.
Changing the authoritarian, top-down definition of what constitutes authoritative information should be part of these changes. (hint: there is no such thing as absolute truth and authority)
We are in the process (in a way we always were) of trying to find a balance between principles, logic, evidence, consensus, scientific and cultural paradigms. Science and politics badly need some sort of pluralism to remain relevant. The corruption of this balance is the main cause of the decline of the legacy media. It should be the task of new media (such as Substack) to foster an environment that supports integrity without the need for compliance with the consensus.
Having the kind of open debates forum I proposed in my post would be a step in that direction.Another tool, such as a survey plug-in could bring user engagement onto a new level and even open the door to public opinion research.
Substack is a publishing platform. It could only take a few easy steps to challenge the traditional publishing industry with a new business model of on-demand publishing/printing/selling.
And I could go on. Substack could become the fulcrum of changes, but before it can, it would need a solid product.
Strategy (Substack as a platform)
Let me be blunt:
The onboarding process sucks
When I moved from Wordpress, I lost all my tags, comments, internal references and half of my formatting. It will take me months to fix it all.User management isn’t much better. I should have the power to segment my subscriber list in whatever way I may need to.
User definition (meaning: what is a user) is seriously confused. There should be a clear distinction between readers and writers and Substack’s strategy should be to find more readers so that it can make more money on the writers. It should be easy to move between the two roles, but the face of the site should be for readers. This is a big subject, in need of a lot more talk, but I’m sure you get the point.
The organization of the site has the fewest of the problems, but could still used some major improvements. Example: drop down menus in the top of the page, for tag lists, for my subscriptions and recommendations, etc. Drop-down menus are standard for any self-respecting web-site.
The editor is below substandard (and yes, the pun was intended. Details in the next post.
Technical support sucks. As I mentioned elsewhere already, blog-posts of emotional support, chats of encouragements and overall kumbaya is not what I need. Give me facts, answers and solutions to concrete problems. Again, see my next post for details.
When I look at the platform and the business strategy, my impression is that Substack is so heavily focused on selling the product, that it has no energy left on making the product better.
If you want to succeed, your primary focus should be the product, not its marketing.
If you have a great idea, it will be copied. At that point, only a vision and a great product behind the idea can keep you ahead of the copycats.
What you need to market, is the product and your vision, which is to a large extent is:
Politics (Resolve)
Challenging the existing paradigm of the legacy media needs fighters. The kind that can tell Disney to fuck itself. I have the feeling that you, @Hamish, @Chris and @Jairaj are just too nice.
That you believe that you can do this the nice way.
That the world will appreciate your creation just like your users do.
That scares me. It makes me ask myself:
Will you stand up for me when a government agency tells you to shut me down? It is easy to stand for free speech when it is not challenged. Let’s not go as big with the example as Disney, just look at some of your users demanding censorship. Will you stand up to them? Will you tell these Gen-Z seekers of safe spaces to go pound sand?
Do you even have a legal team to fight for your rights and the rights of your users?
What if the German government that went after
The point I am trying to make is that the posts where you mention free speech are grossly inadequate. Wishy-washy wishful thinking. You will have to create an absolutely rock-solid policy that you are ready to defend with your legal team up to the supreme courts of any country you operate in. I do not see that policy. Your position should be that you are NOT and should not be coerced into becoming a branch of law enforcement and you respect your writers’ rights to the due process of the law.
Working out the details of this could be a perfect subject for a debate one the platform I proposed.
I still cannot understand why did I not get any reaction from any of you.
What are you afraid of? Talk? Really?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Up to a few years ago, I was working for a major IT outsourcing Company, CGI. Every year at the company meeting, we were told to give our leaders ideas on how to make our business better. When, after many years, I finally sent a memo to the directors of the company with some suggestions on how to improve the company, they just let me go. I treated it as early retirement.
My wife, who is possessing more than half of the family wisdom, says that I should never offer unsolicited advice. In some cases, I should ignore even the solicited ones.
I feel a bit of trepidation, but this is just another thing I feel I had to do.
I hope it will be received in the spirit it is given.
For the rest of you reading it, I AM soliciting your advice. How do you see the future of Substack?
I expect some comments most specifically from the people I read, like and support:
Are you happy with the Substack vision as you understand it?
Are you happy with the product? Editor, user/site management, support, etc.?
Would you see a place for a structured debate platform as I suggested?
As I am writing this, I just found out that Slavoj Žižek just joined Substack
Wouldn’t you like to debate him?Wouldn’t you like to participate in the formulation of a sensible free-speech policy for all sort of media? (Yes, Michael @
, I am asking you.
I just heard you spelling out to The Hill guys your basic criterium: individual controlWouldn’t you all like to see a platform that is a little more than a soapbox, but full of meaningful engagements?
Tell me what you think and feel free to disagree!
For all of you reading this:
PLEASE help me amplify these questions and concerns: share, comment, argue and offer your own ideas.
Demand a reaction from the founders. Tag them with your questions. Look for my next post with practical examples and details.
And just in case anybody missed the most important part of this message:
I like Substack. It is a great idea with tremendous potentials. I want to be part of it and I want to grow with it. I want to see it become the best it can be. That is the point of this post.
Also: I do not want to be a rebel. I just can’t help myself trying to fix things.
So, @Chris, @Hamish, @Jairaj what do you say?
Can we make it happen? Can you envision a future with a little more community involvement?
So, I have a few responses:
1) For me, the importance of Substack is the substantial user base, the simple subscription model, and the fact that I 'own' my subscriber list. Since I also have my own domain, I could switch services tomorrow to something like Ghost if I were banned or Substack were outlawed in Germany. The process would be fairly seamless and some readers might not even notice, aside from the formatting changes. As far as I see it, this _is_ the free-speech protection, and it makes Substack fairly unique in the world of social media.
2) As for Substack taking a stand on free speech: The idea here is probably to give writers the freedom to say mostly what they want without drawing too much fire from legacy media, censorship NGOs, and various other internet discourse police. This is a way of taking a stand, albeit a pragmatic one. My own philosophy about censorship and the like, is that it is malicious and deplorable, but that it can also be self-defeating to concentrate too much on these bad actors and their tactics, because that gets in the way of content.
3) By providing a fairly basic blogging platform and letting writers do what they want, there's a lot of flexibility. Your debate platform idea, which I think is great, could be constructed to a large extent from existing features as a its own substack newsletter. It would require more behind-the-scenes curation than if it were a dedicated Substack feature, but I think the upsides of letting writers construct their own kinds of content within the fairly simple and stripped-down blogging platform Substack provides outweigh the downsides here. Again, platform independence is important insurance for writers, especially writers like myself who have made this their full-time occupation.
4) I enthusiastically agree that there's room for more substacks that place user interactions, or interactions among writers, in the foreground. This is obviously dependent on writer personalities. There are some writers people just want to read, and other writers people want to interact with.
5) More on features. Is the editor perfect? Probably not, but it's workable. I personally don't have major complaints here. The same goes for Substack support, at least in my experience. The truth is that Substack, without advertising, has revenues only from subscription fees, and so providing writers elaborate services, like legal teams, is probably beyond what they find financially workable. To be honest, I think this is probably a good thing: Any pressure on Substack to intervene in the content more directly will make Substack more expensive, likely increase subscription fees, and in the end make Substack more like other social media platforms.
I joined substack (as a reader, not a writer), so *I* could be the customer not the product of the service, so *I* could be the one to chose who gets the (paltry) revenue I generate. But I'm only slowly finding writers I'm willing to commit the full recommended subscription to.
So I'd like to see Substack offer a monthly subscription *to the platform* that would get me access to the premium content of whichever writers I happen to read during a given week or month. This would be in addition to the the current direct-to-the-writer subscription.
The risk to the writer is a potential loss of royalty (i.e, predictable, long term) income, the benefit is no need to distinguish between free and premium content -- it's all your best, premium effort.
But it might bring in more aggregate income, and might distribute more of it to new or niche authors. It would provide a faster, though maybe noisier signal to the writers of what's appealing to their audience.
Speaking for myself, a year is a long time to commit to a single writer when I only have budget tsubscribe to maybe a dozen at $50 / yr. Caveat -- I'm new to the platform, feel free to inform me if I've got the model all wrong.