There's Fuckery Afoot

Substack has begun its enshittification

All good things must come to an end. Substack began with a vision, to provide a platform for publishing that was analogous to the old-school newsletters. Even pre-Xerox, using mimeograph technology, people would pamphleteer, that is print out screeds and either hand them out on the street corner or attach postage to it, and mail directly to subscribers for a small fee.

Substack’s dream was to build a robust system to self publish the written word. Not quite a blog, that was mostly people discovering writing and writers via search engines, but a business model to replicate the 19th century grubby business of newsletter publishing.

Their promise was to make it free, but also allow writers to monetize, and their take would be just 10% of the proceeds to cover their overhead and provide a nominal cash flow.

Early adopters and recent immigrants who built or brought large mailing lists were able to monetize, and generate quit comfortable revenue streams. Heather Cox Richardson writes the biggest ‘stack, but there are plenty of others including the loathsome Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” and even The Bulwark has now eclipsed 100,000 paid subscribers (a cool $10M ARR¹).

The promise though was that the small guys, the hobbyists, would be able to build niche audiences without the hassle of driving growth to build solid revenue streams. And if you wanted to keep your Substack small, you could stay free forever.

That was the promise.

The Beginning of Enshittification

Enshittification, a term coined by the esteemed Cory Doctorow, is the arc of today’s online service, be it social media or similar.

In a nutshell, it start off with ample VC or venture funding, this allowed the business to get off the ground, and to fund the initial growth. The next step was a pivot to monetization, that is to figure out how to turn subscribers/users into cash. This often leads to users getting upset, but because they have the sunken costs of their ecosystem of friends (or whatever they value) in the system, they grin and bear it as advertising is layered on. This is great for the advertisers who then can use the system to extract more attention from the users. Finally, the business become predatory on the advertisers (or whatever monetization scheme), pissing off both the advertisers, and the targets of said advertising.

My wife assures me that both Facebook and Instagram are now shitholes where you can’t find content you want, and advertisements bombard your feed, and the experience just sucks. Facebook and Insta are now shells of what they used to be, Surviving on the momentum of what once made them must have apps.

But Substack didn’t (and still doesn’t) have the advertising knob to turn. They just have the paid subscriptions, and how to get more subscribers to pay for access to their favorite writers.

And how do they do that?

They have articles targeted at writers on how and when to turn on paid subscriptions, how to grow the paid versus free-riders, how to make clickbaity titles, and previews, and to make people want to whip out their credit cards to go paid.

All these nudges and behavioral modification techniques that target the psychology of addiction to get people to pay.

But now, it seems that is not enough. No, the fuckers are making is near impossible to be a decent performing free site.

How they are fucking Sweaty in the arse…

About three months ago, when I published something that was in my mainstream, I would get a fair amount of traffic.

Below is a screen cap from the dashboard:

In mid to late April, I had my best day ever, as I crested 6K views in a single day.

But you will also note that the posts that led to that had some solid days before and after. That middle finger is and was a fairly consistent pattern. The first day being solid, then a couple more growth days before the peak, and then some tail off, but still plenty of network effects as it tailed off.

I should note that in that time period I was posting about every 3 days.

But look at the trend since then, it has tailed off drastically, where the last two days (two posts, one on mistaken assumptions about immigration, and one music post), is anemic.

What the fuck is happening here?

But, let’s also look at subscribers.

That 6K day and its aftermath led a fuckton of people to mash that subscriber button. But since then there has been a decay of the numbers (note that this is a small range, but still meaningful).

I am used to losing subscribers when I post political topics that are potentially inflammatory, but that is usually balanced out by some growth so it is a net neutral trend.

This decline is new, and it almost seems like once you get to about two thousand subscribers and you don’t have paid subscriptions turned on, Substack begins to throttle your reach.

The Notes Factor

In 2023 when Musk was shitting the bed with Twitter, Substack launched their “Notes” feature, a thin social media overlay. It took me a while to start using it, but once I did, I began to see consistent growth in subscribers and engagement. People would restock, and use the Substack app on their mobile or tablet devices to subscribe.

Really, this was an X-factor, and it was a net positive (even though it has become sorta shittly lately).

Still, it was what helped me to get to my first hundred, my 500th, my thousandth, and ultimately my 2,000th subscriber.

Now, I have dozens of people reading, interacting on notes, and restocking, activities that led to growth in new subscribers.

My post from yesterday after nearly 48 hours has a paltry 944 reads, and a 25% open rate. I used to be well above 40% open rate in 24 hours as the email recipients clicked on the post.

The conclusion I am forced to take from this is that Substack is juicing their back end algorithms to limit reach and engagement with non-paid content.

What am I to do?

I am at my wit’s end. I am stuck, not in a plateau, but in a forced rut.

I could just say “fuck it” and move on, ultimately returning to my Wordpress site².

I could continue to write here and just ignore the metrics, knowing that it is an outlet.

Or, I could bite the bullet and sign up for a Stripe account and go paid. I could set it up as a ridiculous monthly fee (say $100) that nobody would sign up for.

What say you?

Or, take to the comments for your thoughts. I really do want to hear from you.

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1. ARR is product management speak for annual recurring revenue

2. https://tralfaz.com