🔒 Relax, You'll Never Make a Living on Substack

As well as general politics and pop culture I like to write about the goings-on of social media, and this week's piece is about Substack Notes. As subscribers to the Ghost version of my newsletter, you might have no idea what I'm talking about. If you're interested, though, I’ll explain a little bit about what Notes is.

 Substack has all sorts of ways of spinning it to make it sound groundbreaking but when you get down to the brass tacks it’s a Twitter clone strapped to the front end of the Substack app and website that forms sort of a dual community hub and discovery layer. It’s quite ingenious, actually, in the kind of evil way that most platforms try to trap your attention—it mimics the way that social media is used to discover and share blogs, but the blogs are nested within the Notes environment itself so that you’re never actually leaving the website or app when you click on something, ensuring everything remains inside the walled garden.

 As a general rule, though, the Notes “community,” in so far as there is such a thing, are kind of loathe to see it as something so banal as social media because they are writers, not influencers or anything of that sort. It’s a cozy literary hub, not a lowbrow den of memes and politics and Nazis. And I can’t stress that enough, don’t you dare say there are Nazis, there are no Nazis, ain’t now and never were. Subtack folks get really upset by that allegation for reasons we’re not going to get into!

 I do like Notes. I like a lot of the people there and I like hanging out there (not least because it’s the only social media platform where I get any engagement) but the community at large tends to labour under some illusions regarding Substack as a whole enterprise. You can’t blame them, the illusions are planted deliberately by the guys who run the site, it’s the entire strategy. It’s one of the most popular illusions in the history of humankind—that you’re eventually going to make money doing this.

 Like other social media the site has its own checkmark system but rather than based on notability it’s based on revenue. It’s something to chase. Instead of three different coloured ticks it should be three sizes of money bags attached to a fishing pole. It’s an advertisement to other users that you made it and so can they.

 “We don’t make money unless you make money!!” is one of the oft repeated slogans they bat around every time someone accuses the admins of giving someone-or-other a rough deal.

 Two recent rounds of discourse on Notes have led me to realise that this illusion is much more widespread and ingrained than I’d even known. One is a familiar topic that resurfaces now and then about people wanting some kind of revenue sharing model so that more writers can get paid…

…and the second was the short-lived arrival of bestselling author Glennon Doyle, who signed up for the platform and was immediately bullied off—No, scratch that—as my critics insist I word it: Voluntarily chose to chicken out of using the platform after being unable to hack a very large but fair amount of valid criticism of a successful and presumably already wealthy writer joining an indie platform and earning an amount of money she doesn’t need but we do.

 In any case, I feel like it’s time for another possibly ill-advised episode of S Peter Davis Shits Where He Eats, but one that might relieve some people of the anxiety of chasing that orange tick:

 Either zero, or a number that can be rounded down to zero, of the people reading this will ever make a living from Substack. Some of you might eventually make a living writing—that’s still my goal!—but you won’t do it here. Because…

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