So I hit half a thousand.
I hear you’re cheating on Post!
As some of y’all might have noticed, I’ve dipped my toe into Substack. So here’s a comparison of the platforms to celebrate this big round number.
When I was at Berkeley, I hung out with the art majors. We always felt there was a divide between the East Bay folks who did wacky things and the San Francisco snobs who made boring high art.
That’s Post and Substack.
Over here are folks who are experimenting and playing, picking up the stray tip. Out there is a polished crowd, with their paid subscription income streams.
Why on earth did I sneak out across the bay to check out those people?
Well, you get tired of living in a dingy warehouse where it looks like the landlord is more interested in side projects other than the shit that you care about.
We’ve been waiting for comment notifications for half a year. And yeah, that comment count bug in April broke me.
What’s it like out there with the white wine sippers?
They got a clean interface. And their notification system actually works.
But damn, they are really geared towards newsletters. It’s possible to follow someone on Substack Notes without subscribing to their newsletter, but it’s not obvious.
More problematic than an overstuffed email inbox, it’s almost impossible to get traction as a small account. You think things have gotten quiet here? Try saying anything out there unless you’re responding to someone else. Substack doesn’t have an “explore feed”, so the only way anyone might see your comments is to either build a big subscription base first or to hope than an author looks at their “My Subscribers” tab and notice your comment among the scores of other comments to sift through.
Don’t get me wrong, the authors at substack are all super nice and welcoming. But it doesn’t feel great to know that anything you say won’t get engagement unless you’re actively piggybacking on someone else. (Then again this comparison might be my Post privilege speaking as an early beta user here).
From what I can tell, the Substack crowd is super focused on the craft of writing (not surprising since it’s a newsletter subscription platform), and of course there is plenty of politics cause that’s the new established religion of our democracy. But I miss the wide variety of art and photography that I find my follow here on Post. I hope it’s there on Substack, but I haven’t found out yet.
Still, Substack is one helluva platform for newsletters, so my recent dalliance has gotten me writing regularly again and finally make some progress my “year of catching up”.
So where next?
I sure as hell ain’t going to a place that is run by the current or former CEO of Twitter. If I’m doing pro-bono content creation, it’s not going to be in the service of either type of fucking incompetence.
Structurally, I prefer micropayments over the long term commitments of a subscription economy. As one might guess from the way I’ve framed the comparison, I’m fond of the Post crowd that has coalesced in the past six months. But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and I’ve lost confidence that my priorities are the platform’s priorities.
That leaves me with writing on my home blog and cross posting to both Substack and Post. I don’t mind cutting and pasting once, but more than that is unsustainable, especially if I include the distracting subconscious tug to check notifications on multiple platforms.
But hell, I’ll keep it up for another week or two.
Once I hit late May, I should a difficult decision.
In the meantime, let’s keep this party going, shall we?
On to 600!