Dear Substack, Why You Hide Writing?

This isn't *really* about Substack it's about writers and writing and platforms that keep letting writers down time after time because damn it gets tiring

I read that Medium is looking to hire someone who can help them find writers to come write on Medium. I don’t know if that’s true but I think it is.

Here’s what else I read.

I read that Substack grew by a million new members and someone said maybe it’s all the writers leaving Medium and I laughed.

I don’t know if that’s true either.

This is not about Substack or Medium.

It’s about the craft of writing and people who give a damn about it, because that’s not everyone in case you didn’t notice. Some people write because they can’t not write. People who, like Kafka said, become monsters courting insanity if they don’t write.

But it’s not the only reason people write.

Some people write because they have something to sell.

Some people write because no one has ever listened to them and they need to spill their guts and they say they don’t care about readers but I don’t really buy it because if that was true, they’d be writing in a journal not online.

But whatever. Not my job to judge how other people fool themselves. Enough of a job to figure out how I do because we all do. Like Patrick Rothfuss said, everyone tells a story about themselves in their own head and we build ourselves out of that story.

Some people write because jobs don’t pay enough and everyone is struggling and everyone has a side gig and bills to pay and they just need to earn a little more.

Hang with me, because I have a point.

Maybe a blade more than a point.

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This morning I logged into Substack. I used to love the category pages because that’s where I used to find new writers to read. Let me show you…

This is what category pages used to be…

They were full of posts. Writing. Actual writing by writers. I’d find art related posts on the art category, fiction related posts on the fiction page. Hop around the categories and find posts on every topic they had up at the top of the page. Imagine that!!

Here’s the category pages now…

And here’s the homepage…

See that image banner with posts at the top of the homepage? Those are people I already read. Nothing new there. And under it? Notes.

Substack was supposed to be the good place.

Substack was where we came when Medium dropped the ball, when Vocal dropped the ball, when Newsbreak dropped the ball. When every other writing platform dropped the ball and let down real writers, there was always Substack.

Because here’s the reality of writing online.

Vocal? If you can win contest after contest, you’ll do okay there. If you can drive traffic to your own posts, you can do okay, too. Unlike Medium, they pay for external traffic so you don’t only get paid for member reads. But they can’t drive views to save their lives. If you write there, be prepared to drive your own views or you’ll have none.

And Medium? Used to be great, it really did. Now the comments are full of spam and writers are earning $20 for a post that used to pay $100. Except for the AI writers. They’re cleaning up over there and writing posts bragging about their earnings. No one really thinks you can post twice a day and not be using AI, do they?

But there was always Substack.

Except now it’s Notes.

Notes, everywhere.

You know what notes are, right? Politics, quotations, and pithy one minute takes. And look, I get it. That’s where the action is. Takes a lot less time to post a note than write and edit an actual post.

But — how am I supposed to find writers to read?

When some guy shares a photo of his dog or complains about Trump, am I supposed to use my psychic powers to know he writes kick-ass poetry? When someone posts what she was doing at 5, 10 and 15, I’m supposed to know she’s a killer writer?

Am I supposed to check profiles of everyone on Notes?

I ask that seriously.

Can we get realistic for a minute? No one does that.

Now the only writers I see are the ones I already followed.

And the ones at the top of the leaderboards in every category.

Which makes sense, I guess, since Substack gets 10% of the fees from the people who have paid Substacks and they earn most from people at the top of the leaderboard.

It makes me read less here.

Turns Substack into a bubble where the people I already was reading are pretty much all I see now. Them and notes. As a reader, that’s not good for the platform, is it? And when a platform isn’t good for readers, how long will it be good for writers?

If anyone was to create a platform that actually supported writers? Sometimes I think they’d clean up. But maybe not. Maybe there’s not enough of us. I don’t know.

Makes me think about what I’m trying to accomplish as a writer and where the best place to do that is. I don’t have any answers but I’d sure like to hear what you think.

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