Substack vs. Indie

Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators, says Ted Gioia, and maybe that’s true, but it’s important to remember that people on Substack, like Ted, are not “indie creators” in the fullest sense — they’re dependent on a platform that sets the terms of engagement.

Now, to be sure, if I were going to write on any social-media platform it would be Substack. Most people who write there make little or no money, but it’s possible to do very well indeed, and the 90/10 split of the subscription revenue is remarkably generous. (“Remarkably” because if they had chosen 80/20 or even 70/30 — the latter being Apple’s cut for app creators — not many people would have complained.) But:

Substack is not a profitable company. Its CEO says it could be, but those are just words.

Its unprofitability means that it’s still dependent on investment from venture capitalists, and they can put pressure on the people who run the show to change things up — for instance, to take a bigger cut of the revenues.

The same pressure could lead to the introduction of ads.

Their CEO has written that they don’t like the algorithmic determination of content — but also that they’re “not against algorithms” and will use them if that helps their users. What does and does not help their users is for them to determine, and they can change their minds at any time, for any reason or none. (And they already do use an algorithm to feed you what they want you to see in Notes, their version of Twitter or Bluesky, which shows up on your home page and cannot be hidden).

Not only could the founders of Substack change their minds about any of their policies and procedures, and do so at any time, they could also sell the company. Indeed, this would be the norm for Silicon Valley startups.

In short, Substack is as subject to enshittification as any other platform. And for Cory Doctorow, who coined the term, enshittification “is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a ‘two sided market,’ where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.”

If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Substack — Austin Kleon, whom I just linked to, has a great Substack — and what Freddie says is true:

No matter what the usual suspects say, Substack has dramatically expanded the number of people making money as writers and deepened the engagement of a lot of passionate and talented amateurs, and for that I’m grateful. At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere.

No such insistence here! I can easily see why people would choose Substack in preference to what I do here — and indeed, if I had to make my living solely from writing I would almost certainly be using Substack myself. (Also, I would almost certainly be living below the poverty line.) But every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup.

P.S. I’ve seen a lot of bad writing both pro and contra Substack lately, but I just had to laugh at this by Sam Kahn:

On this platform, for instance, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jo Paoletti’s diary — which is well-written and insightful and gives me insight into the mind of this person I’ve never met. There simply is no forum, prior to the launch of Substack (or, let’s say, of the blogosphere), that would have given me access to Jo’s diary. No newspaper would have run it — what is the news hook? — no publisher would have printed it unless Jo had gone on to be, like, a head of state or turned out to be a serial killer. A platform like Substack multiplies by some logarithmic absurdity the volume of expression in the written word. It releases founts of creativity that, for decades or centuries, were buried.

That’s a pretty significant parenthetical correction there! It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.

Let’s be clear about what Substack is: it’s a blogging platform with a paywall — that’s all. And it’s not the first one: Medium, among others, preceded it. Substack is just the one that happened to catch on, largely because it offers the best (i.e. least revenue-extractive, most flexible) deal to writers. But it doesn’t enable any kind of writing that isn’t already enabled by the World Wide Web.