Substack’s Ideology

A year later Chris published a post about his love-hate relationship with Twitter, which took the ideology a step further:

There are two central evils within the Substack ideology:

Subscriptions. As Chris likes to say, people will ‘hate read’ things, but they won’t ‘hate pay’. When readers are asked to pay for content, they make their consumption decisions more consciously, as their better selves.

“We believe that journalistic content has intrinsic value and that it doesn’t have to be given away for free. We believe that what you read matters. And we believe that there has never been a better time to bolster and protect those ideals. Now, more than ever, publishers of news and similar content can be profitable through direct payments from re... See more

This might seem pretty small and trivial of a thing to base a network effect on, but it might work. Substack has said readers are 2.5x more likely to become a paying subscriber to one Substack newsletter if they’re already a paying subscriber to another.

By launching reading apps for web and mobile, Substack is attempting to carve out a space in readers lives that is separate from administrivia and spam. A quieter, more sacred space. 

The thing I didn’t understand going into it was that Substack wasn’t just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers thanks to the leverage technology gives them—it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The Substack model wasn’t just a business... See more

What happens when readers subscribe to too many Substacks? What happens when the Substacks they subscribe to feel stale? The pressure is there and inevitable to create systems that sort, filter, and promote content...  In reality, I don’t think people actually want “full control” over what they read, because that’s too much work. What people a... See more

The first thing they’ve done is make sure as many readers as possible are aware that they’re using Substack. When your login information and credit card is stored, and the sites all look pretty similar and function the same way, it reduces the friction of signing up and paying for new newsletters. This is why from the beginning it’s been so importa... See more