"A friend told me he’d “recently signed up for a bunch of Substacks” and then held up his phone to show me the email folder he routed them all into, which contained thousands of unread messages."
I'm reminded this person exists every time I get a notice that says something like "so-and-so subscribes to On Repeat, Kneeling Bus, and 946 other Substacks." They're not signing up for something new or interesting; they're creating a pile of digital artifacts on a server somewhere. My question is, why? Is it aspirational? Habit?
Yeah I always notice that too - when Substack started surfacing people's subscription lists it was both amusing and eye-opening (I see why they did it but it also highlighted this issue which maybe they don't want to foreground). At some point I recognized that I'd reached a point where I couldn't really take on any new subscriptions without dropping some others, but everyone has to figure out their own approach to that content surplus.
Related note: When I look at my own list of Substack subscriptions, I'm struck by how many have gone dormant (at least half). I could go through and unsubscribe to the defunct ones but why bother?
I assume it's just the natural churn rate for blogging in general, which is usually pretty high but there's usually not a good way to visualize it. Substack is a bit closer to social media perhaps - the platform invites a lot of people to start posting but it isn't as easy to keep that going as a FB/IG/Twitter presence.
I'm not sure what you mean here. You can route Substacks to/through an RSS feeder. I do that using Feedly. That's separate from people collecting almost 1k different newsletters. RSS or not, I can't see the point of amassing that many.
I think about poetry a lot as an alternative paradigm to the worst aspects of digital content (as I describe here) - inherently resistant to the incentives that push us to seek engagement, at least when it's at its best, and letting the process be its own reward as you say. A photo of a good poem on the page might still go viral on Twitter/Instagram but it was (ideally) created outside of that context.
Poetry is also a great corrective to the way computers are always nudging us to make our own digital communication more bot-like.
amen. a long time ago when I was more naive, I asked a poetry professor of mine why so many poets seemed to write things that seemed purposefully obscure or willfully opposed to appealing to wide audiences. why were so many poets so invested in writing things that would basically guarantee their audiences remained infinitesimally tiny. the teacher said because it's the only form of writing where you are free to do that. it's the difficulty / obscurity / unfamiliarity of poetry that makes it resistant to the cannibalizing forces of the marketplace. inaccessibility is a feature not a bug. at the time I found that answer unsatisfying and self-serving, frustrated as I was by experimental poetics and its academy-ensconced proselytists, but now, after watching the world change in my lifetime, it seems visionary
"It's the only form of writing where you are free to do that." Exactly. So well said. And I agree - the value of that quality of poetry is more and more clear as the world continues to change.
great read in the era of endless paywalls in legacy media sites as well. also, I started using a new VPN that worked for a couple days but now makes me do an image-recognition captcha every time I open a new tab. it claims "malicious traffic" -- the very reason I use it in the first place. so your piece really hit for me, lol
Haha that's a fantastic detail - perfect illustration of this thing I've been grappling with more, the blurring distinctions between human and bot in online behavior. The increasingly paywalled legacy media landscape is another part of this that I didn't even get to, but certainly reflective of similar dynamics.
Depressing and freeing all at once.
Thank you. That's what I was going for. It should be freeing to acknowledge some of these things!
wait … *I* am traffic??
Sorry bro
As Brazilian that subscribes to too many substacks, I loved this post.
Great to hear, haha. Thanks for reading!
"A friend told me he’d “recently signed up for a bunch of Substacks” and then held up his phone to show me the email folder he routed them all into, which contained thousands of unread messages."
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I'm reminded this person exists every time I get a notice that says something like "so-and-so subscribes to On Repeat, Kneeling Bus, and 946 other Substacks." They're not signing up for something new or interesting; they're creating a pile of digital artifacts on a server somewhere. My question is, why? Is it aspirational? Habit?
Yeah I always notice that too - when Substack started surfacing people's subscription lists it was both amusing and eye-opening (I see why they did it but it also highlighted this issue which maybe they don't want to foreground). At some point I recognized that I'd reached a point where I couldn't really take on any new subscriptions without dropping some others, but everyone has to figure out their own approach to that content surplus.
Related note: When I look at my own list of Substack subscriptions, I'm struck by how many have gone dormant (at least half). I could go through and unsubscribe to the defunct ones but why bother?
I've been surprised by that too. Like, did everyone run out of steam at the same time? What happened here?
I assume it's just the natural churn rate for blogging in general, which is usually pretty high but there's usually not a good way to visualize it. Substack is a bit closer to social media perhaps - the platform invites a lot of people to start posting but it isn't as easy to keep that going as a FB/IG/Twitter presence.
Don’t blame the user for Substack being yet another anti-RSS
I'm not sure what you mean here. You can route Substacks to/through an RSS feeder. I do that using Feedly. That's separate from people collecting almost 1k different newsletters. RSS or not, I can't see the point of amassing that many.
You can. But it’s inconvenient. No integrations like “send to RSS” etc. certainly not their desire.
it seems like poets have always been in this situation, consoling ourselves that engagement with form is / must be its own reward
I think about poetry a lot as an alternative paradigm to the worst aspects of digital content (as I describe here) - inherently resistant to the incentives that push us to seek engagement, at least when it's at its best, and letting the process be its own reward as you say. A photo of a good poem on the page might still go viral on Twitter/Instagram but it was (ideally) created outside of that context.
Poetry is also a great corrective to the way computers are always nudging us to make our own digital communication more bot-like.
amen. a long time ago when I was more naive, I asked a poetry professor of mine why so many poets seemed to write things that seemed purposefully obscure or willfully opposed to appealing to wide audiences. why were so many poets so invested in writing things that would basically guarantee their audiences remained infinitesimally tiny. the teacher said because it's the only form of writing where you are free to do that. it's the difficulty / obscurity / unfamiliarity of poetry that makes it resistant to the cannibalizing forces of the marketplace. inaccessibility is a feature not a bug. at the time I found that answer unsatisfying and self-serving, frustrated as I was by experimental poetics and its academy-ensconced proselytists, but now, after watching the world change in my lifetime, it seems visionary
"It's the only form of writing where you are free to do that." Exactly. So well said. And I agree - the value of that quality of poetry is more and more clear as the world continues to change.
Phenomenal. For someone whose ability to make a living is tied to being online, this is just haunting.
The least I can do is transmit some of my hauntedness to my fellow content creators.
great read in the era of endless paywalls in legacy media sites as well. also, I started using a new VPN that worked for a couple days but now makes me do an image-recognition captcha every time I open a new tab. it claims "malicious traffic" -- the very reason I use it in the first place. so your piece really hit for me, lol
Haha that's a fantastic detail - perfect illustration of this thing I've been grappling with more, the blurring distinctions between human and bot in online behavior. The increasingly paywalled legacy media landscape is another part of this that I didn't even get to, but certainly reflective of similar dynamics.
A bleak but necessary read.
Thanks...I try to steer clear of the bleakness but sometimes I can't help myself.
The truth is rarely pretty
> Talking to no one is the near future of social media
Why might one repeatedly discuss the present in the future tense? 3 of many possible reasons:
* One knows consciously or otherwise that the present is repugnant and chooses denial
* One lives in a bubble where the present has not arrived and refuses to see that the phenomenon is already endemic
* One wants to be able to claim to have predicted something despite it already having happened, such that he can be considered a forecaster
Things to consider
I said "near future" rather than present because that's what I meant. If you believe it describes the present more than the future, that's fine.