SubStack Navel-Gazing
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substack-navel-gazing-and-briefly>
In which I turn my gaze inward...
why the weblogging Renaissance under the guise of SubStacking?:
What Does SubStack Say That Its Mission Is?:
Hamish McKenzie: Welcome, Facebook and Twitter. Seriously: [When] we started Substack… we were concerned about… the attention economy…. Our addiction to social media is having negative effects on both individual and collective thought… doomscrolling… rage-monsters… conspiracy theory-addled mob[s]… poisoned information supply…. We have set out to show that platforms that put writers and readers in charge are just better. Substack… a calm space that encourages reflection… free of advertising or any other distraction… no addiction-maximizing feeds, autoplaying videos, or retweetable quote-retweets to suck you into a psychological space you never asked to be in…. Information… put into your brain based on… writers [who] reward your trust, not… a dopamine hit… performative posturing…. Calmness… is the real killer feature…
LINK: <https://blog.substack.com/p/welcome-facebook-and-twitter-seriously>
SubStack is… classical weblogging—but. What is the “but”? The “but” is:
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A very aggressive push of the post to the email inbox of the recipient, rather than waiting for the recipient to come surfing by, with perhaps an rss-flag tickler to remind readers to come by. A subscription email with a website attached, rather than a website with a push RSS feed attached.
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A very, very aggressive focus on what used to be called the tip jar, which hath now fed upon that meat upon which Cæsar doth feed and grown great, and morphed into a paywall.
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A focus on longer-form—a newsletter rather than a log of readings and reactions. (That, however, may not turn out to be the stable form of whatever medium it turns into: Adrian Hon’s <http://mssv.net> used to have three columns—links with a phrase or a sentence, paragraphs, and essays.)
SubStack is—like Medium <http://medium.com> before it—at one level an explicit reaction to the consumption and destruction of what appeared to be a growing weblog-based public sphere by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and company—each of which consumed part of the space, and each of which succeeded in generating superior dopamine-hit random-reinforcement engagement, which turned what I at least regarded as a functional and improving intellectual ecosystem into: the Net of a Million Lies.
I guess the game is to return Facebook to its role of posting updates for family and friends; to turn Twitter into SubStack’s comment section, and to, as Hamish writes up top, provide “a calm space that encourages reflection… free of advertising or any other distraction… no addiction-maximizing feeds, autoplaying videos, or retweetable quote-retweets to suck you into a psychological space you never asked to be in…”
Will it work? Probably not. Can it be worse than Zuckerberg’s or Dorsey’s firehoses of fear-generating misinformation? Almost surely not. Thus it is, I think, worth trying.
As Noah Smith said on the inaugural edition of our Hexapodia podcast <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-i-relief> <https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/47874.rss>, we have already tried everything else, with less persistent success than Sisyphus.
& more on what we hope to do with our Hexapodia podcast in the future…
