You can subscribe to it I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing. But you can also subscribe to this blog!

I adore the concept of writing. I like building mental models, sharing them with other people, and working to understand other peoples’ mental models. I like playing with the world by pointing my mind at it and wondering.

I’ve formerly blogged on Facebook (rip), this WordPress-driven blog, and LessWrong. But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like I was part of an active intellectual community online.

Last year I participated in Inkhaven. Many of the participants used Substack as their blogging platform, and I learned just how much of a social network Substack had become. I didn’t notice in time to switch over, and I also ended up getting a lot fewer eyes on my posts than I wanted. Many people were just checking their Substack feeds. So I’ve decided to give it a try.

But I’m also kinda mad about Substack.

During the maturation of social network apps, a major phenomenon that happened is the negative side of the network effect, where if you’re not on that network, you don’t get any of the benefits. In many cases you are effectively forced to join, like if your workplace requires it, or if you want to talk to your niece ever again. And the company who runs it owns all your data, and controls what you see, and can use their stranglehold on the users to make the service increasingly extractive, riddled with ads, etc etc. This dynamic also concentrates power within society. This happened a lot during the 20th century with various forms of communications or infrastructure like Ma Bell or Standard Oil. But with software, the barrier for competitor entry should be much smaller. The hard part is convincing everyone to join your social network instead of that other guy’s social network.

So some people did that, and got billions of users onto a very small number of apps. Now, in theory, this should not be as constraining on the user as a physical telephone line or the roads. You should be able to switch to a different social media app. But if you do, then you can no longer interact with anyone who is on that app. And if literally everyone you know is on Facebook, then there’s not much point to going to some other app, even if Facebook is really really bad.

But it didn’t have to be that way. It is possible to have two social media apps that talk to each other. And indeed, this is what email does. If you use Hotmail you can still send an email to someone who uses Yahoo. Things are more complicated with all the features of modern social media apps, but over the 2000s and 2010s, we figured out structural methods to circumvent those issues, under the banners of distributed or federated social networks. Protocols were standardized, open-source clients were written and tested, and finally, anyone could spin up their own social networking client and talk to everyone else (who was on the same protocol). Subsequently, all the internet’s users proceeded to not care, and instead continued to feed from the hand that bites them.

Substack’s whole value proposition was that they let you have a good blogging platform where you could get paid to write, and where you would own your relationship with subscribers. Subscriptions were email subscriptions, which is important, because email is the only federated protocol that is mainstream. If you wanted to leave Substack, you could just take the list of your subscribers’ email addresses and send the emails from some other platform.

What I learned during Inkhaven is that Substack has since betrayed that. They simply built a closed social network on top of their existing web interface for blogs, complete with in-network-only posts (called “Notes”) and an algorithmic feed. You can now even “follow” someone without subscribing, which is the second-to-last step of a bait-and-switch to no longer owning your audience. Substack.com is your one-stop-shop for having your community of discourse be owned by new management instead of old management.

Obviously I’m being old-man-yells-at-clouds about this. I’m not really blaming anyone in particular. The Molochian forces of enshittification are strong, and the people who run Substack are just some little humans like the rest of us. I want to have a community, and that is where a community is, so I’ll go over there and try it out for a while. I’ll still cross-post some stuff here, mostly on principle (and LessWrong when it’s relevant).

I’m doing a daily writing goal for September, and plan to continue over the next couple months. I don’t plan to post every day, but still fairly frequently (often as the formerly lambasted Substack Notes (or LessWrong Quick Takes) so subscribing shouldn’t be too annoying on your inbox).