Why I H8Substack
After pretty much a year of Substack, I feel like having a small rant. But first, the story so far. My move to publish on Substack was prompted by the convergence of two things. The first was what I call my “metrics crisis: where I saw my engagement on Instagram go to levels equal or less than when I first started my account with zero followers under the name of “Poetry and Petrol”. The second push came from Substack itself. Substack is the home of serious writing, of that there is no doubt. Any heavyweight author who is anyone is on Substack. Although I would like to say I wasn’t swayed by the gravitas and allure of the “you are not a serious writer if you aren’t on Substack” appeal, it was part of my decision.
However, what really pushed the decision over the line was how Substack promised not to bury authors in the algorithm. Watching my Instagram posts being shown to less than 2% of my followers and sometimes getting single-digit views, broke my heart. In Substack, I saw a shiny new world where I could connect with my audience, and the promise of a thousand true fans seemed real. Here was a community living the promise. So, with all the enthusiasm of a New Year’s gym resolution, I announced my move.
After the move, I put my weekly blog and poems up in a regular schedule, filled in the details and worked my way through the extensive and far from simple back end, and of course, I set monetisation options. I was keen not to overpromise and under-deliver, and so I set the options to the lowest allowed and worked on plans on how I would build value and thus membership tiers in the future. All the while, I was mindful of how poor my health was at that time and how the deterioration had been both progressive and unnervingly rapid. I had genuine concerns that I could sell subscribers short. How naïve I was!
I researched and applied, and it was then, as I was trying to research strategy, that I hit what would become my biggest complaint about Substack and the Substack universe. It is not what you think. Instead, it was much more insidious. Substack itself has its promotion advice person posting behind a paywall. If you want to learn from Substack, that information is paywalled. I am not “that” naive, people have bills to pay, I have one of them, but Substack have an employee whose job is training and communication who puts that training and communication behind a paywall. I could be mistaken, but I could not access good guidance for free. To me that is like having an open world game where the instructions have to be bought, piecemeal.
I am a firm believer in freemium; indeed, in a past life, I leaned on the information I gave away for free as a rolling advertisement of what was available if you paid. To me, a consultant has the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and competence via free info. I literally proved I was worth the investment, and if you could succeed without me, reverse engineer what I was able to do, then more power to you, because that is how I did a lot of my learning too. We all learn and push each other to do better. I did not give you two paragraphs and say, that is your lot, no freeloading.
The thing is, at no point in what was available for free could I establish whether what was behind the paywall was worth the admission fee. My free info was designed specifically to tell you that what you pay for is worth the investment. It may only be one cup of coffee, but as any finance influencer can tell you, those five bucks here and there add up very quickly. Plus, the coffee shops I go to sell really nice coffee, and I am still not convinced that what you offer is better than that Friday pre-concert Costa Rican. I honestly, really doubt it. As a Substack employee, the suggestion is that (I think), I am paying for some sort of inside knowledge. Which translates to, Substack being pay-to-play, which is not unique or what they advertise.
Since that initial pang of disillusionment, my resentment has done nothing but grow strong roots. Substack is absolutely awesome if you have an audience that you want to convert to revenue. Top-notch, Bravo. The promises it makes of helping you build and connect with that “authentic audience” have so far rung extraordinarily empty. Worse than that, as the year has progressed, I am increasingly finding articles of interest behind that elusive Substack paywall. Effectively Substack has become a $4.99 an article provider, and like academic journals, a prohibitive cost for non-academic users without institutional access, Substack has priced me, and I would guess people like me, out of the knowledge market. It is bad enough I can’t web cancel the TLS free trial I had to take out to read an article on Brain Injury and Personality (which turned out to be excellent, if not what it looked like), now I have to spend $4.99 per promising Substack article.
In my time on the internet has gone from a massive library and discussion forum where ideas, grey research and knowledge were traded and shared freely. It wasn’t commercial, and we knew it couldn’t last. I knew money would be required, but to get paid, there were barriers to entry. Again, I am not anti the democratisation of knowledge, the reverse. However, lowering the bar and allowing people to charge an entry fee where there is no guarantee that what you are buying being of any quality is not democracy; it is a circus. And perhaps in an ironic turn, that is what democracy has become too.
So far, Substack seems to be the largest single enabler of this, although let me know if there are other culprits. I don’t want to play social media tag on notes where we circle jerk subscribe to each other’s “publications”. What I want is for people to look for poetry and see poetry. Not every creator has the time or the available spoons to engage in what your platform calls promotion.
As it stands, I post my work there so it can
