The Substack Editor

Half-baked ramblings on the direction of Substack and my writing workflow

I’m now getting a little skeptical of this whole Substack fiasco.

It had been alluring authors onboard, targeting a very specific set of users (somewhat like a BookTube crowd), but now expanding into more of the general audience with very standard social media formats — long-ish notes, live video, podcasts, and now even short videos (eww)!

Short videos? On a platform that’s meant to serve long-form content? Oh, come on!? I’m pretty frustrated at that. And guess what, it even does that swiping thing which brings up a new short video. I’m so glad though, that I have maintained my streak of not flicking through a short video ever (except this time when I sneezed while scrolling through my phone), I’m not sure how I’m managing to pull it off in this economy.

The only thing that pulls me back to Substack is the excellent community of power users, lack of spammy content (it’s not perfect, but it’s nearly not as bad as Twitter) and the collection of some of my favourite publications. The platform is serving as a good way for growth for writers who can enjoy censorship-free distribution and sustain themselves just through their content.

And maybe Substack's right when it does so. After all, it's meant to be a product for creators to earn through what they make. Substack, in return, gets a share of the creator's revenue. I find this to be a better model for creators, unlike most of the Meta platforms which earn through ~~intrusive~~ personalized ads. Substack, on the other hand, is providing more options for creators to engage with their audiences, allure them through their well-curated notes, shorts and longs(!?) and convert them to a paid subscriber. Even if the creator is not earning out of Substack, Substack's doing a good job at giving a medium to for these often new creators to leverage its algorithm and find an audience who's interested in your work.

With more pressure from their harbingers of revenue (creators and god-forbid: VCs) and the competition from platforms with large network effects (Twitter, Instagram), introducing shorts on Substack might've been an inevitable step. Something which Hamish and co. might've scoffed at doing, but had to do anyway to stay relavant and keep increasing its base of users.

However, I think it's going to be increasingly important (and difficult) for Substack to maintain its standing as a positive, thought-provoking social media platform, and it actively tries differentiating itself from the "traditional" media and social media, such as The Washington Post or Twitter. Maybe it needs to rethink what it is, fundamentally: currently a platform, and not a protocol. But it’s close.

Substack's home screen view before and after, it's getting kinda clear that they're trying hard to differentiate between the long-readers and the short-readers, so that the readers keep readin' and the scrollers keep scrollin'

I was inspired to write this after being blinded by Substack's light-themed editor. Imagine a big box of white light staring at your face, while you're browsing for 1+ hour in dark mode in a dark room. ☠️

But it also served as a reminder on how should my writing workflow be. What I create should not start from the Substack editor, or least my computer screen (which is where I do most of my writing). It typically starts off as a set of pointers on a piece of paper, which then gets translated to a first-draft Notion doc. I make my final edits on the screen of the editing platform that I'm using to publish my article, to share it with the wider world.

My current writing workflow. The only thing I’ll try to reduce from this point onwards: perfection.

I plan to post my upcoming blogs/newsletters on Samyak's Nook (my "real" blog) followed by Masala Dew (Substack newsletter). I've been doing it the other way round, in case you ever noticed. You’ll be notified whenever I make a post on Substack and you’d be able to read it, but I still want to maintain my blog with all the good stuff that I create in the future. The blog feels more like it’s mine: a digital garden which I can curate the way I want. Substack, on the other hand, gives off a rental place vibe. You get me?

However, the experiment goes on. I'll be posting heavily on Substack in the months to come, at least till the end of this year. This will be the social media that I'll be the most active on. I might lurk on to Twitter, LinkedIn or even Instagram every once in a while. But if you wanna find me, you now know where to go.

I’ll talk more about social media ownership models, censorship rules, network effects, protocols v/s platforms, micro → macro effects on wellbeing caused by social media and so much more in the posts which follow.

If that’s your vibe, pls subscribe! Thank you.