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Notes -
The anti-pattern inevitability is real.
I really had high hopes for Substack when it started taking off. Bringing good writing back to the internet? Yes, please. No low content / high production images and video. An obvious orientation to longform content. Seemed great.
My suspicion is that they spent quite a bit to jumpstart their author corps. I know they paid Scott Alexander quite a bit to migrate over. The same with Yglesias. My assumption is that a lot of the other big names (Noahpinion etc.) got some upfront and/or promises annual $$ for their initial move. (Again the following is conjecture) I wonder if subscribers are now struggling with inundation. I wonder if paid subscriber realities just aren't what projections were. If that's the case ....
... Enter the "social media-ify" strategy. Constant engagement (push, email, reminders within the posts) with nudges to subscribe, pay subscribe, or share with friends. Their weird twitter clone meant to drive engagement with articles (and, thus, recycle the subscribe-pay-share flywheel).
It's really hard to rely on the ad supported model without doing really shitty anti-pattern things to get users to be compulsively interested in the platform. Even the monster that is YouTube is now a wasteland of clickbait, unskipable 10 minute ads, and shortform non-content.
Internet writing may still be able to just pay the bills for those outside of the that top .1% power curve. Kind of like fiction novel writing functioned up until maybe the early 2000s. Mostly, however, it serves as a base from which to build a companion stream of income. There are some really great business and technology blogs I follow that are content dense, but only update 2 - 3 times per month because their authors are out actually making a living doing consulting or conference keynotes etc. Their blogs - which are their passions, to be sure - are actually their primary marketing engines. If you're writing about pure philosophy / social critique / all the fun stuff we get into on the Motte, however, I'm not sure you can self-sustain without having a day job. And, frankly, if you're writing about that stuff non-anonymously, you may find yourself losing that day job.
tl;dr - Writing on the internet used to be writing on the internet. Then everybody not on the internet had to go and fuck with the program.
The thing is, they don't have any ads though. So I guess all of the engagement-hacking is aimed at trying to get readers to purchase paid subscriptions to more creators? I guess that's a strategy, seems pretty weird and annoying to me though.
Maybe it is true that they're financially underwater from paying and promising too much to their initial set of authors. Which could make them desperate enough to try any number of things.
I don't expect they're listening to me or anything, but it'd be great IMO if they worked more like Nebula - you don't directly pay for individual publishers, you instead pay Substack itself $5 or $10 a month or whatever. Most of that minus a cut gets paid out to authors based on how much time you spend reading them. Then Substack doesn't care how much you engage because they get paid either way. But it's now further in every author's interest to keep putting out content that keeps people reading, since the friction for the money slipping away if they let up is much smoother. But they don't have the ability to do much except put out more high-quality content.
Maybe that could even apply to anybody who writes on the platform. I don't expect I'd ever make enough to live on from people paying to read what I write, but it would probably feel cool if I earned a few bucks a month from such an arrangement. That's about the price I'm suggesting though, so maybe it's also an incentive that your paid subscription is essentially free if you manage to publish stuff on there that gets at least a little bit of engagement. Maybe it would be just a simplification - say my account is -$10/month for a subscription. If I get $2/month from people reading me, then they just bill me a little less that month. If I get $15/month from that, then my account goes positive, and maybe they only actually cut me a check if I'm over $50 positive. So there'd be a big cloud of unpaid readers (or maybe they're paywalled off?), a smaller cloud of paid readers, a smaller one yet of people who mostly read but also write some stuff that only gets read a little, and the smallest one yet of the people who write things that gets millions of reads and make significant money from it.
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