🔒 Substack Has Become Middlebrow Twitter (Derogatory)

Hey, Ghost readers! I know a lot of you are here to get away from Substack, which is precisely why I set up this alternative for y’all. Part of my schtick is talking about social media and internet culture, and how it’s pretty much all going to heck, and Substack is a part of that whole system, so just so you know, I’m not going to be harping on about that community all the time. Think of me as a much less popular Casey Newton with more direct insight.

 I suppose I’m going to have to have to spend some time in this one trying to dance around naming someone and thus avoid summoning them to fire up a conflict I have no interest in battling. I’m kind of in a bind, here; If I identify this gentleman and he comes across this piece then he will accuse me of passive aggression, subtweeting, and using his name for clout. If I subvert the passivity accusation and alert him, that will be even worse, as he will take this as an indication that I am interested in engaging in Direct Conflict.

 But this ain’t Black Angus and I don’t have beef on the menu. This is much more about confronting an idea than an individual. It’s a commentary on social media’s evolution and its seemingly inevitable traps.

 I was an original adopter of Substack Notes, the Twitter clone that the newsletter platform launched soon after Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of that website and thus an early exodus location for people who wanted to escape the coming Groypocalypse. Of course, most of the Twitter refugees weren’t interested in writing or reading newsletters, so the migration dried up kind of quickly. For the most part, those who fled Twitter wound up instead on Woke Twitter (Bluesky), Instagram Twitter (Threads), or Insufferable Linux Nerd Twitter (Mastodon).

For those who remained on Substack because we were writers or readers, we got to watch the evolution of an unconventional social media ecosystem in real time from the beginning. As has become a tradition for me around this time of year, I wrote one and then a second sort of “state of the community” essay and I guess it’s time for the third.

 And I guess, for those who might have tried and abandoned Notes in 2022 because it wasn’t Twitter, it might interest you to learn that it’s now, sort of, Twitter. But not in any of the good ways.

 This realization for me was kind of triggered by the unnamed individual’s recent controversial assertions on Notes that social media needs to be more directly confrontational. It has become boring, he believes, because people are holding too much back and aren’t insulting and attacking each other directly and to their faces enough.

 This is not an opinion that’s exclusive to this one guy, but I think he’s the only one saying it directly: That it is your God-given duty, as a participant in social media, to be an Asshole For No Reason (AFNR).

 It’s relevant to point out that this person is famously and even proudly an AFNR and I think it’s a type of projection for assholes to believe everyone else is, similarly, an asshole. Ipso facto, anyone who is not being an AFNR to your face must be instead slinging their insults toward other writers in private conversation, or else publicly but without tagging or notifying the insultee. This, he contends, is passive aggression, which, to the health of a culture, is inferior to old fashioned aggressive aggression.

Here's the thing—social media is already plenty nasty, and for all of Substack’s problems, not being nasty enough isn’t one of them.

 The site’s founders will harp constantly on about how it’s not Twitter, and they will cite the nature of its discourse as the reason. I don’t know if anyone would consider Substack to be a highbrow website but I think it’s safe, at least by what content it pushes algorithmically, to call it middlebrow. That means people will tell you to go fuck yourself in 280 words instead of 280 characters.

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