Substack Is Your Boss, and He's Dissatisfied With Your Performance
Enshittification has arrived, inevitably, and on schedule
One of the biggest problems with trying to build a career in something creative in a capitalist world is that the tools and platforms you need to use to achieve your goals are all adversarial to those goals. When some service or company insists that their success depends on your success, they are invariably defining “success” on their terms, It’s circular—their definition of your success is whatever benefits them, and if it doesn’t benefit them, then you’re not really successful.
In the society we have, in our wisdom, chosen to build for ourselves, every interaction is transactional. Most companies try to gain your trust by obscuring the purely-business nature of the transaction. It’s the field marketing agent or street hawker who tries to pull you into a conversation by complimenting your shirt. We live in a society built on lies.
In reality, everything is just money flowing around. Nothing happens without money moving. The means by which a company extracts wealth from you defines your relationship with them. If you pay a fee for the service, then you’re a client or a customer. If they take a cut of your earnings, then you’re an employee.
So let’s talk about Substack again.
Substack has what you might call an inconsistent reputation on an internet that has become so fractured that the only two types of platform you can join anymore either accuse Sydney Sweeney of Nazism for making a Boomer pun or are owned by guys who make straight-arm salutes at political rallies.
Nevertheless, from a purely technical standpoint it’s been pretty great. It’s free to use, and its internal network effect—walled garden though it may be—has allowed writers to build thousands-strong communities of followers in a short amount of time, using their writing alone as the pitch. Now that short-form social media has taken over the internet the only way to gain a following anywhere else is to be really good at tweeting, something which not every long-form writer is great at, myself included. Either that, or there’s Instagram and TikTok, which require you to be a really interesting, bombastic, outgoing personality with a rich and visual life, something which, again, not every long-form writer is great at, myself included.
Writing is the ultimate spend-money-to-make-money business. I run an identical version of this newsletter on Ghost, which is expensive and has extremely few readers. but I feel it’s necessary because the Substack brand is too toxic for other social media platforms, so for any chance of getting anyone on, for example, Bluesky to read my work I need to have a non-Substack delivery method.
But though they’re both just a blogging and newsletter platform, the dynamic is very different. Though Ghost is sort of trying to experiment with internal networking it doesn’t really have a discovery layer so the only way to attract readers is either to develop a very large social media following or pay to advertise. Basically, Ghost and Beehiiv and the other upfront-fee platforms people taut as alternatives for Substack are for people who are already famous.
Substack, in trying to wear a friendly face and appeal to the ambitious amateur, has had phenomenal success in capturing an audience intimidated by the prospect of labor-intensive self-promotion and expensive services. But they are the marketer complimenting your shirt. They don’t really like your shirt and couldn’t care much less about your writing. Substack’s strong performance out of the gate has led some of us more cynical types to wonder when the platform is going to do the inevitable thing and start enshittifying.
Last month Substack did another venture capital funding round so successful that it earned them the so-called “unicorn” status—a startup worth over a billion dollars. Despite this, the company still isn’t profitable—its expenses are greater than its revenue. Its operating costs are funded by rich people like Marc Andreessen, and Marc Andreessen is not doing this out of the kindness of his heart. Marc Andreessen does not have a heart. He has a tiny little radioactive egg-shaped rock down there powered mostly by resentment and racism. He wants that money back, with interest, and soon.
This is just how startups work, and why the difference between a startup and a scam often feels like it can be measured on a timeline. Substack has two paths to eventually becoming profitable enough to pay its investors back within their lifetimes—which, granted, for Nosferatu, are generally longer than ours:
One, they can assume their rate of growth will continue forever and so continue to scale upward over the course of, like, another decade, until they reach that sweet spot where the increasing revenue breaks even with the increasing cost… and then do that for another several decades until Marc eventually gets his billions back, but by this time he’s just a head inside a Futurama jar.
Two, they can change their business model to try to make more money faster, which… surprise and spoiler alert, this is what they’re doing right now and actually seems to have started doing a while back without telling anybody.
A lot of Substack writers noticed their subscriber rate slowing down earlier this year, and by “slowing down” I mean it “crashed into a brick wall.” Enough people spoke up about it to be able to roughly trace the slowdown back to around March. A lot of writers had a lot of theories but none were conclusive—maybe the site has already reached saturation point with celebrities. Maybe AI slop is just diluting everything else. Maybe it’s inflation—but this should only cause a slowdown in paid subscriptions, surely, not across the board.
Well, it seems Substack recently admitted in an email to writing coach Sarah Fay that, yes, they have made changes in the back end to drastically reduce the number of subscribers that writers get. If this sounds bonkers, the rationale is actually pretty sound for a company that is blazing like a cane fire through capital loaned to them by an egg-themed Batman villain.
Fay’s post detailing her interaction with Substack support is paywalled, and out of respect for her business (we’ve all got bills to pay, baby, hate the game, not the player) I’m not going to blurt everything out, but I think it’s important to the public interest to report on what little glimpse we can get into the site’s opaque box. Don’t worry, it’s not a lot.
According to Fay, Substack support, cloaking their words in positive spin, say that they’ve made some platform-wide alterations that will better pair readers with their interests, and they acknowledge this results in fewer subscriptions. (For some writers including Sarah Fay, “fewer” means “upwards of 90% fewer.”)
The goal, evidently, is that they are changing their focus away from helping people grow their subscriber lists and more toward improving the ratio of paid subscriptions. Our fates are now in the hands, once again, of the almighty Algorithm, and as readers we are trusting it not to show us anything we wouldn’t love enough to pay for. For us writers, we are, unfortunately, often not deemed, by the Algorithm, to be worth paying for.
This is where, for most of us, the wedge is driven between the writer’s interests and the platform’s interests. This is where Substack management—the once personable and deeply community-involved trio of Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Mills Baker—close ranks, draw the shades, and start blasting market-sanitized PR copy from a loudspeaker across the factory floor. This is the transition into stage-two enshittification.
For those still unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar, “enshittification” is the term coined by essayist Cory Doctorow to describe the seemingly inevitable process through which internet social platforms thrive, decay, and then die, basically because there’s no way for this type of thing to exist long-term. It is temporary; it has a life cycle, one that is frustratingly brief. In Doctorow’s cycle, “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
On Substack, if you, like most writers, are someone who produces anything higher than zero free content, then your huge list of free subscribers is great for both you and your subscribers. You get an audience for your work, and they get to read it.
But this arrangement is terrible for Substack. They maintain and pay for the staffing, the cloud storage, and the email infrastructure that facilitates an exponentially-growing number of users, most of whom do not pay or earn anything through the platform and are therefore, from a business point of view, freeloading detritus.
To mitigate this and pivot toward profitability, Substack desperately needs to stem the flow of free subscribers and low-activity subscribers and limit, to the point that they can get away with it, the gratis usage of their platform, focusing their attention instead on the high rollers and top bestsellers. They do this in ways that aren’t always visible to the closed Substack ecosystem. For example, did you know that Substack will unilaterally, and without notice, terminate free publications that they deem to be low-engagement?
If you didn’t know this then you’re probably not on the Substack subreddit, which is easy to fly under the radar when you forget other social platforms exist. Between people trying to slip self-promotion past the mods in defiance of the sub’s rules and the futile begging for the secret to growth, you see a lot of stories there of users who had their publication or entire account locked for reasons they can’t get straight answers about from a customer support team whose supportiveness is sharply graded on how valuable a customer you are.
Substack Support, which was barely ever a thing to begin with, has really only gone downhill, especially since they delegated it almost entirely to a chatbot that’s barely more sophisticated than Clippy. Search for support related keywords and you will find legions of people braying in frustration that they can’t get help with anything, and it’s very common for accounts to be terminated without explanation or possibility of appeal. Not for breaking any apparent rules, but seemingly just for being kind of unpopular.
Famously, they won’t suspend you for using the platform to spread open Naziism, and they also won’t take action on plagiarism, but they will happily shitcan you if you have a lot of free subscribers who aren’t very engaged. You are bandwidth drains, actively costing the company money at a time when the venture capital reaper is grinning toothily and pointing at an old grandfather clock made of the bones of failed tech startup founders.
This is the fundamental problem—for writers—with Substack’s model of taking a cut of writers’ earnings while everyone else rides for free: They don’t tell you this at the door, but they expect you to make money, and if you don’t perform, they can and will fire you.
This situation will get worse as time goes on, and people who believe in Substack as an idea will continue to try to find ways to justify everything. Sarah Fay, while admitting her own justifiable frustrations (90% drop in subscribers!!) is a writing coach and her mission, and the mission she guides her clients toward, is much more aligned with that of Substack: maximizing paid subscriptions. To that end, in her post she tries to cushion her clients’ concerns by characterizing free subscriber growth as a harmful distraction from The Work—a counterproductive dopamine hit that’s bad for your mental health.
Apparently the days of getting a lot of subscribers from a viral note are also now over, so… yay?? Viva the end of discovery and the new era of target-marketing your current subscribers to open their goddamn wallets already.
But hi, hello, it’s me, the cynic, who generally doubts the ability for the vast majority to make anything close to a living on Substack and sees such a platform as more of a stepping stone to a career.
I always want to make this clear: I really appreciate paid subscribers (you guys have actually more than covered the research costs of my book in progress, which are not insignificant) but every eyeball on my work is super important to me, which is why it’s incredibly annoying for Substack to unilaterally decide to throttle my visibility.
It has exposed the fundamental reality of Substack’s relationship with its users. The aspect of a writer’s trade that is their desire to just be read and to be free to write and to reach the hearts and minds of other human beings is none of Substack’s concern, and is in fact rather contrary to their mission. Their survival depends on your ability to produce marketable writing. Their model, which worked very well to attract people to produce content, now forces them to act like a publishing house when they need money to start flowing in.
A publishing house that makes $0 on 90% of the books it publishes—that is, it still pays to print and distribute the books but gives the vast majority of them away for free—isn’t going to last very long. Substack can’t suddenly act openly like a publishing house—it can’t start turning people away at the door—so its only choice now is to enshittify. That means using quiet back-end tricks to shed freeloaders and start squeezing people for money.
Oh and yes, running against a principle that they have always held central to their philosophy, they are finally looking seriously at advertising. Because, I think, they are starting to realise what I’ve said before: Capitalism can’t figure out how to operate in a world without advertising.
A lot of people are going to wonder, if I’m so critical of Substack, why am I still here? A lot of Bluesky people are going to demand to know why I’m still here, considering Substack just cannot stop tripping over their own dicks on the Nazi issue. I certainly don’t hold any reverence for Substack but there are a few reasons why I don’t abandon it. I try to be an ethical person but also a pragmatist, and the fact is that the only effect on white supremacists that me leaving Substack would have is it would be a slight net positive for white supremacists—I don’t have a big enough name to be able to carry on with this thing on Ghost alone, so the worst that will happen to white supremacists is they lose another voice speaking out against them… which is good for them, actually.
As for the extra fraction of a cent that might wind up in a Nazi’s pocket by me staying… as somebody who lives outside of the USA I feel I still have cleaner hands on this issue than anybody who is paying taxes to the Trump administration.
But really, I’m still just playing the game I’m being made to play. I may be throttled, punished for running an unmarketable column with no consistent theme (did I seriously just randomly do a book review last week? I can’t just shake people’s expectations up like that!) but I’m true to myself. I’m still able to get more eyes on my work there than anywhere else. If that changes then I will go where the eyeballs go.
This newsletter is free to read but voluntary monetary support is greatly appreciated and does come with perks—specifically, paid subscribers get each piece a full week ahead of everyone else. But also, paid subscribers get to read monthly excerpts from a book that I’m writing, which is a deep dive into how geek internet culture over the past 30 years has dramatically transformed Western culture and helped pivot it toward the right. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
What makes no sense to me is that as I grew my subscribers, I would regularly get a paid subscriber for every 28-30 free. I was growing both. Throttling free subscribers has translated into throttling paid as well.
I want to write for free and have people read it. Sorry