I’ve asked a few people to follow my Substack, and it usually goes like this:
“Want to follow my Substack?”
“Sure! Sounds fun! Send me the link!”
“Have you heard of Substack?”
“Nope! What is it?”
Well, I am here to serve and entertain my readers, and since my Substack already has a focus on consumer technology, an explanation of Substack seems to be in order!
Long story short, Substack is another blog-hosting platform. A website where you can write stuff. But this blog is newer and more well-run that others, and also it has some important, timely new features that have made it trendy and popular.
There are many places to host a blog. For many years, I wrote my blog on what is called WordPress. WordPress is nice, but there’s a free version and there are paid versions. Over the years, the premium versions have gotten more expensive. All I need is a simple blog, and the “premium” version I had offered a ton of features that I wasn’t able to figure out how to use.
By this year, it was getting a little too pricey for me, so I tried the “free” version. Unfortunately, part of the deal for the free version is that WordPress puts advertisements on your blog.
That is what ultimately became a deal-breaker.
These are not advertisements for Mercedes, Apple, Whole Foods, or other products my readers would be interested in. The ads are, instead, more just pictures of rashes, toe nail fungi, hot furry singles in your area, colonoscopy videography equipment (with gif demonstration, embedded right there in your blog!) - basically, whatever is on the world’s list of the most disgusting and embarrassing concepts is going to be featured on your free WordPress blog.
There was a time when WordPress was the undisputed best free blog service, but that was years ago. New, free blog services have gotten a lot better, so considering that WordPress is littering my work with appalling imagery, 2022 seemed like the time to switch.
Substack is the latest and greatest thing in free blogging. As I mentioned, it’s got a couple features that make it unique. The main thing is that Substack is optimized for a post-2020 world; I think most of its surge in popularity is because of that.
In 2020, (and well, honestly, even before that) people were getting kicked off of social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, for having opinions that were not popular to those in a place of power and authority. Much has been said of this, and I don’t think I need to explain, but the relevant thing here is that for some, who relied on social media income for a livelihood, this was a major problem.
These “de-platformed/cancelled” people needed to rebuild, but they wanted to rebuild right. There were these journalists and writers, who, like the three little piggies, had built the proverbial houses of their careers from straw and sticks. Now, they were desperately seeking a writing platform that was made of brick, in order to avoid the big bad wolves, such as Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. Substack markets itself as that blog of bricks, with a couple tricks to offer a little protection against censorship.
I hope that putting this all into Three Little Piggie terminology has made it more palatable, and now you understand the main appeal of Substack.
The way Substack protects writers is by making it very simple to collect email lists that the writer can always have. Even if Substack gets taken over by people who don’t like you, or if Substack tries to start charging you big fees, you have your subscription list, and can take your ball and go home and reach/connect with all your fans and readers some other way.
Also, Substack makes it very easy for an individual writer to get money directly from the readers who are willing to pay. This places writers in a very good situation, where their audience, the exact people who love their work, are the ones being relied upon to provide a living.
Compare that to an advertising model, like YouTube, or Instagram, or even a newspaper. The platform’s advertisers, say Nike or Ford, might just suddenly decide they don’t like something I said about family-style dining, and pull their sponsorship.
Full disclosure, I don’t think that WordPress’s free-version advertisers would ever pull their sponsorship. Credit where it is due, Big Toenail Fungus Medicine is, for all of it’s faults, quite free-speech friendly.
So that's a quick overview of what Substack is, and why I’m here. I like Substack 1) for that censorship-resisting spirit, and 2) for the potential to easily monetize from the pool of George-obsessed readers who most certainly are out there in droves.
But I don’t bank on making money from this, and frankly I would be flattered were I somehow to draw enough attention to be de-platformed. Those are not the principle reasons why I am here. The actual main thing I like about Substack is that it’s growing and new and it seems like whoever is running it is really trying to make a cool and innovative platform. There’s a lot I like about the mechanics and look of it all. I like the way my posts look, without me having to figure out all the formatting and fonts. I like the way it posts to Twitter. I like the tips it offers writers.
I’m leaving WordPress because it is the wrong tool for me. Theoretically, if I had a budget, I might be better off to pay for WordPress and design my own site there. But I don’t. I use the free version. And the free version places gross ads on my posts, and I don’t get paid for those ads.
So here we are! Substack! Thanks for reading.