substack: the poster child of the zero click web

The creative, open web is being strangled by homogenized omni-platforms. Just look at the evolution of Substack.

When Substack burst onto the scene, it was a blogging platform for writers which also sent out posts as emails and collected monthly subscriptions. It made sense. Medium and Wordpress were already exploring newsletter capabilities, but they were rough in both design and implementation, and relied heavily on SEO tricks to be noticed. Plus, there were guaranteed payments to journalists who adopted this new platform, giving it cachet and media attention.

Fast forward to today, and the newsletters are just a small part of what it does. There is video. There are podcasts. There are reels. There are livestreams. There is a Twitter style feed with an infinite video scroll. There was a recruitment campaign for podcast bros, YouTubers, and TikTokers with promises that they won’t have to deal with those pesky community guideline violations. It’s an entire self-contained ecosystem.

At the same time, it also became a microcosm of the disconnects between the tech industry and its intended users. Because every time a new feature is announced with fanfare, the majority of comments ask what happened to just having newsletters, and why is it that Substack is hellbent on becoming Twit-Tube-Word-Twitch-Tok, and if it insists on this trajectory, why can’t you put icons to other socials on your navigation.

The answer is very simple. They don’t want you to leave. Substack, just like every big, successful social media startup, is using the Facebook model of luring users in with a focused, in demand, clean, simple product, then adding a flood of features as it slowly closes the noose around what it hopes will be a mostly captive audience. If everything is here, from your microblogging, to your writing, to your little multimedia empire, why would you ever go anywhere else?

So, what we ended up with when it comes to Substack is just another implementation of Zero Click Web. Like plants crave the electrolytes in Brawndo, VCs who fund every sizable online destination crave audiences that won’t leave. The only way the startups in question know how to do that is to flood the zone with every feature under the sun, then heavily advertising that the thing you normally do elsewhere is here now, so why bother keeping the other account active.

All you’re trading in return is having your own, custom, recognizable presence. Sure, your content is precious to you. It’s your baby and you worked really hard on it. But to every other platform, it’s just another .jpeg, or .mp4, or whatever file, or another entry in a vast database in yet another cloud server. And they’ll handle it for you as long as you sign up, occupy one more generic square in their feed, and pad their metrics.

It sounds like an okay idea. Kind of. Except when every platform tries to offer you the same exact deal, you have to invest in every platform, and instead of offering you one place to do everything, what they’re really offering you is another place to get lost in a tsunami of slop, hustlers, wannabe influencers giving it a shot, and once in a while, an almost out of place slice of greatness to maybe, just maybe… stand next to.

So, instead of picking your poison in terms of to whom you’ll surrender your content for a chance to get it seen, you now have to pick all the poisons at the same time. You have to, because you’re missing on potentially 300 million to 2 billion eyeballs based on which platform the users prefer to use more often, maximizing your chance to land on their timelines.

Yet again, I’m thinking of Bo Burnham’s song about the internet, only since he wrote it during the pandemic, it evolved to become “a lot of bit of everything all of the time” as the shareholders continue to demand that a finite number of platforms, which can all only have a finite number of active users, who all have only 24 hours in a day, keep on showing more signups, more engagement, and more time spent on the platform every quarter past the heat death of the universe, and into infinity.

The users? The creatives? The quality and merit of the content? That’s now noise left in 2013 or thereabouts, when platforms actually had to fight for their user base and to keep the content coming. Now that they have us and our only other choices are small digital wastelands, the only thing that matters are the whims of the shareholders.