Reasons why Substack isn't scalable
As is my custom at the end of each month, I was cleaning my inbox of all the junk emails that accumulated, and a large volume of that came from the half-dozen Substack newsletters I'd subscribed to. Sifting through them took the better part of an hour.
Yes, I do use Substack, on the rare occasion. Having a blog on there seemed like a good idea at the time, while I was helping a small business set up a newsletter for the niche community it served. Ostensibly readers have the option of just reading it instead of subscribing.
The writing on Substack is generaly of a much higher quality than elsewhere, it's more thought-provoking, and there truly is a diversity of opinions.
The thing is I got increasingly irritated by the UI over time. Every Substack has a full-screen 'subscribe' modal where there could (and should) be a home page, and that makes Substack a real pain in the ass for anyone who wants to browse through what's on there. A home page is called a 'home page' for a reason, and users shouldn't need to click through modals to access one! In fact, one of the basic principles of UI development is the more actions required to access something, the less usable that UI becomes. Somehow, it became common practice in modern Web development to make users click this and that, for no good reason, just to read a damn home page! And, in fact, I've resorted to using my browsers' reader mode a lot more now.
Anyway, once you're past the aforementioned modal, you find some authors punctuate every paragraph with subscribe forms, and others paywall the last ~70% of their posts. Those half-paywalled posts also end up in my inbox. Everything needs to be 'monetised' these days, and everyone's producing content for an algorithm while desperately begging for 'likes' and 'subscribes', you see.
But the email newsletter model doesn't scale well. How much would a single person pay, each month, just for the pleasure of reading a few blog posts that would have been freely published a decade ago? How many posts (some half-paywalled) does a person want to accumulate in his/her inbox, bearing in mind it's much easier to just bookmark the authors who take their fancy?
The other reason it doesn't scale well is the content becomes background noise, unless we're very selective about the 'newsletters' we subscribe to. Since January, my inbox has been flooded by a hypercritical deluge of posts bitching about every little thing Trump and the Republicans say and do, and certain transgender authors think it's worth publishing a newsletter every time a politician says or does something transphobic. Post after post, bitching about the minutiae of what the majority ended up voting for. I'm always searching for a bit of abstraction: How did the political system end up being the way it is, and what shoud we do about it?