I've not been the most active contributor to the Substack space the last six months, and the more time passes, the more I find myself looking at the platform with mild levels of distrust, distaste, and outright apprehension. It began, for me, when Substack incorporated audio posts, offering a kind of pseudo-podcasting space to creators.
Not a bad idea, I figured. I tinkered around the edges of adopting it, but ultimately recognized that I don't produce enough audio content to make it a worthwhile endeavor.
Then video came to the platform, and I found the idea interesting, sure, but I had concerns. Why would a person on Substack use it for video when there are other services/platforms designed specifically for that? Wasn't Substack supposed to be a new, free space for writers? That was how it had been sold to me in the early days, as a new place for medium-to-long form writing to once more try to thrive on an Internet dominated by video and podcasts.
Now, Substack introduces Notes, focusing on short form tidbits. I'm sorry, but we already have Twitter and Facebook, digital spaces designed for us all to hop on and spurt out whatever snippets happen to be flitting through our minds at the time. Why would I make use of these Notes? I'm not trying to be flippant about this, it's a genuine question.
I saw Substack as a return to 'traditional' blogging, where the creator/author's hard fought constructive efforts could not only be enjoyed by a broad audience, but even better, be supported through paid subscription tiers! It was a brilliant return, one hoped, to the days when thoughtful, meaningful text material could make a major impact with the public!
And here comes Notes, once more hopping up to cut off our attention spans and introduce/encourage the kind of animosity that ends up spreading on platforms like Twitter and YouTube, where creators end up taking pot shots at each other and starting flame wars that guide us away from the bright promise of what the service started as.
Maybe I'm just being too pessimistic, but look to every major tech platform made ostensibly for creators to flourish on since 2005; have ANY of them survived without becoming completely dominated by only a small handful of accounts? How long do they remain enjoyable to the majority of their userbases?
And why should you care what I have to say on the subject? After all, if you took the time and care to read this far along, I'm hopeful that you, like I, are far less interested in Notes, and more interested in the longform material that gave Substack its early success.
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I am disappointed that after reaching the ripe old age of a few days, Substack Notes, is being measured as a clone of Twitter, A subscription generator, or its monetization potential. I was actually hoping it would be a community for substack writers to communicate with each other. That is what would make it unique from the other forums. Now after a few days - its already a failure on all fronts!
It does irritate me when certain newsletters promote the number of paid subscribers they have- something I learned about on Notes! Please! Can we just have a place for thought? I don't care about all the big guys. I am actually no longer exposed to most of them on Medium after effective implementation of "Show lessnot dominate the way it does if one is not proactive.
The world of story telling has not changed....how the story gets published has...Self publishing(Once declared Vanity Publishing was the first step...technology has changed everything on that level. In fact soon AI will be doing all the writing. Use the technology to the best advantage. Pod cast is good for the blind, video good for the deaf...I use Word crafting, vignette vids and voice to publish my stories as well as a slide show presentation. Its working....look deeper Josh.