Substack Cofounder on AI Slop Content & the Decline of Social Media

Great writing, great media, great culture in general is this inherently valuable thing. We've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource.

This was also an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. A really important moment to actually save blogging and sort of writing on the internet. In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, 'Substack is just blogging with a business model.' And I was like, you know, that sounds pretty good.

I aspire that the Substack app can be a place where you look back at the time you spend on it and think, damn, I'm glad I did that. That made me a better person.

I've always seen the free speech thing as an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do. The way we think of Substack is making a new economic engine for culture. And the idea is not a partisan idea, it's not a political idea directly. It's just this idea that great things are made by independent voices who can do the work they believe in, make money, have editorial freedom, have a direct connection with their audience. The backdrop of starting Substack was this idea that the internet came along and smashed a lot of the existing business models for culture. And what came in the wake of that was these massive internet-scale networks that are phenomenal businesses and connected everybody like never before and had a lot of amazing positive attributes, but in my estimation, in our estimation, were kind of driving us crazy. The core of Substack is this idea of independence. This idea that the individual left to do the thing they believe, say the thing they believe, make the thing they believe, supported by an audience that's there for them, is a crucial ingredient in a healthy culture and a free society. Freedom of the press, freedom of speech is one necessary precondition for that. I kind of think that in the long arc of history, that's not that controversial of an idea. I think it's a very American idea. But at the time, just because of the world, it was kind of out of vogue, shall we say, quite severely. The thing that surprised me in 2020, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives, not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In my telling, I would say selectively the best and most interesting people that were getting thrown from the ramparts. And the fact that this thing we were creating, this new economic engine for culture that gives you this independence, happened to be there at a time where a bunch of the most interesting writers in the world were getting summarily tossed from their longtime institutions. That lined up really well for us from a business perspective. It was spicy from a cultural perspective, but that's the gig. Just to quickly add, it's amazing to see on the other side of the coin with the blogging ecosystem, how much that's changed. We've gone through LiveJournal and Xanga and Blogger and Google Reader, and then you had a phase where, Chris, when I met your co-founder Hamish initially, the company was three people. This was an era where the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. WordPress powered the blogging ecosystem, but there was no economic model. You ended up with a lot of spam, people hacking poorly maintained PHP websites. So I think this is a really important moment to actually save blogging and writing on the internet, to actually create a model. For a long time, people thought, 'Oh, I'm just going to plug an Amazon book and get affiliate fees, or I'm going to put Google AdSense all over my blog.' That was the only way to create any sort of economic thing. For all of us in tech, it was cool to see that Ben Thompson from Stratechery showed that there is maybe an alternate model, but it was almost like always a curiosity and something that was annoying to actually build. You'd have to set up your blog, set up your payments, do all these other things. So it was also an important moment for Substack to emerge from the internet media side to clean that all up and actually make it easy to put together something that became the big economic engine. In the early days, people would often say to me in an accusatory tone, 'Substack is just blogging with a business model.' And I was like, you know, that sounds pretty good. If that's all it was, that would be pretty cool. And it turns out it's more. It's podcasting. It's a whole network. That seems good.

There's only one thing better than people staying on the platform, which is when people leave the platform, take advantage of the export features, and then subsequently return to open arms and come back. We call them boomerangs, and we love to see that too. I think the right to exit is really important. People thought that was very dumb. They said, 'Well, if you just let your customers leave, won't they just leave?' In the short run that might be true, but in the long run it created the right structure for us. It meant that we have to, and still have to, build a network that has enough value that even though you can leave, you don't want to, and even if you do leave, you might choose to come back. I think that has caused us to keep the right thing at the forefront of our minds. But there's something even more important about the direct connection. It's not just that I can leave. To my mind, what a subscription is is the option to give someone to reach out and tap you on the shoulder. It's to say, 'If you want to, you don't have to send me an email all the time, but if you want to send me an email, if you want to send me a push notification, if you want to show up at the top of my inbox, I kind of give you that right.' Something that lets you do as a writer or creator is to take creative risk. Something I hear a lot from YouTubers is people who are very good, have massive followings, who are very successful, say, 'I have this idea for a thing I could make, and I know there's an audience out there who would like it, but I can't make it the way I want because no one's going to see it because it doesn't align with the algorithm.' The ability to bring your audience with you is a way to give humans the power to override the algorithm and say, 'I've got this trust relationship with my audience. I want to exercise it and go out on a limb and have them pay attention to this thing I'm saying is good.' Sometimes it might be bad and you might unsubscribe, but sometimes it might be great, something that could not have existed if the only way to reach everyone was to please the algorithm every single time. So in the beginning it was a blogging platform with a business model, and the vision has gotten bigger into more of a network, more of a platform across formats.

I would say we started from the very beginning with a very ambitious, some might say derangedly ambitious vision. The backdrop was we think the internet has massively reshaped the economic incentives for media. The origin of the company was I was taking some time off at my last startup, and I'd always wanted to be a writer. I'd always been an avid reader. I've thought that what you read matters. The media you consume is not just a way you spend your life. It changes who you are as an individual. It changes how you see the world. It changes cultures and societies. So great writing, great media, great culture is this inherently valuable thing. My first instinct was I should make some of that. I could write an essay. How hard would that be? I know how to program. I know how to type. I started writing what was supposed to be this essay or blog post detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the internet. I said, 'Look at all these great things the internet has done, but it's also created these mimetic evolutionary landscapes that are driving us nuts. This is going nowhere good. Look at how the culture is shifting.' I sent this essay to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer, and he let me down very gently. He said, 'It's 2017 and your essay is about maybe the newspaper businesses are in trouble and maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. Dude, we know. Everybody knows that. But the better question is, let's say all those things you're complaining about are true. What could you do about it? How could that be different?' And we started arguing about that. So we had this sort of techno-optimist idea that you're not going to turn back the clock. There are new powerful technologies changing how everything works, and those things come with trade-offs. The right way to address that is not to lament it or wish to go back, but to put these things to use in service of people. We should imagine what the best version of this future is as these new networks and technologies take off, and we should work proactively to help usher in the better, freer, more exciting version of that future. We had this big, grandiose thing, and then we just had the kernel of a way to start. The way to start was we could make it dead simple to start a paid email newsletter. There were probably 20 people in the world that really, really wanted it, but they really wanted it. It was the kernel, the smallest possible instantiation of that much bigger idea, where you were going to create this new economic engine that lets any independent voice make the things they believe in and make real money doing it. It's a way around the cold start problem because you could have an individual person. The very first Substack newsletter made total sense. So we started with the grandiose version firmly fixed in our minds. We always imagined, even then, we looked at YouTube as something that was maybe the closest version to this thing that already existed.

I'll tell one step before that because it went into my thinking. Very early in the early days of Substack, we were like, 'The thing that's going to be really different about Substack is it's all going to be paid because that aligns the incentives. That makes this thing different. So in order to be very pure to our vision, we're not going to allow anybody to have a free Substack or to send emails to free people.' That evaporated with our first customer, because he was like, 'I'll just use Mailchimp for the free version and then funnel the people here.' He created this stitched-together thing. It was like, 'This is really dumb because if you want to have a successful paid Substack, you have to have a free Substack.' In order to make that experience good and have the conversions work, we should just support that. It's not an abrogation of our vision. You need to provide this other thing for the thing to work. Not too long after that, we realized the same was true about Twitter and the social networks. In 2018, 2019, if you wanted to have a successful Substack, you had to also have a successful Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. You had to have some top-of-funnel place. The same way legacy media was struggling and you had to have Facebook traffic or Google traffic. There were always these other networks that were the source of your business. So even if you were this independent creator, you were downstream of these other platforms. That had a philosophical consequence: we're trying to make this place with these different incentives, but you're still at the whim of the Thunderdome. You still have to play the Twitter game or the Facebook game. And it had a very practical problem: those networks don't give a damn about you as a creator who makes money. Mark Zuckerberg can decide in a fit of pique that people are annoying him about politics, so he's going to turn off politics. If you're a politics creator who depends on Facebook for your livelihood, that's an existential event. It's not even because they're trying to do that. It's just that these networks twist and turn. They don't have any intrinsic interest in helping you build your audience and make the thing you believe. So we had this idea that in the long run, the only way to really make that work for people is to build one of these networks ourselves that was built on different laws of physics. We were going to build a network, a place, a destination where you could experience the internet and have all those great things from social networks, but with a different business model and a different incentive structure. It's not going to replace them, but it'll live alongside them and be the one place on the internet that actually wants you to succeed. It actually wants you to find something interesting and long-form to read or watch. It wants you to find and fall in love with something enough that you might choose to pay for it. That's going to create a very different feel from everywhere else that just wants to keep you glued to the screen. We had this theoretical idea of why we had to do this thing, but we also knew it was going to be quite difficult. It's very hard to start a new internet-scale network, and it took years.

Definitely. There are two tacks you could take with that. The one that a lot of people's first reaction is to say, 'Algorithms are bad. They're severing our ties, putting us into bubbles, or exposing us too much to people outside.' Whatever the thing is, there are trade-offs, so algorithms are bad. I think a more productive take is algorithms are powerful and they're a tool that people use. They serve the ends we tell them. If we tell them better ends, they'll help us get better results. This is something we talk about a lot at Substack because a lot of our users felt that the good thing about Substack is there isn't an algorithm, and I just connect directly, and that's actually good. The take we have is there's something much better than that: what if there was an algorithm that actually served you and was trying to help you find the things you deeply valued? The nerd term for this is an objective function. If the objective function was actually closer to your own interest, rather than trying to sell you more ads, that would be better.

I take the same approach we talked about with an algorithm, the same thing about building a network, and the same thing when we talk about AI, which I assume we will. I see sponsorships and advertising as a powerful force. The thing that would break Substack is if we just looked at how legacy social media built advertising and said, 'We're just going to copy that.' Because if we did that, we would be importing the incentive structure and the business model that puts the platform at odds with the people on the platform. On the other hand, there are a ton of Substackers today. Some of them are, in my opinion, some of the very best Substackers who are selling sponsorships. I think there's a version of unlocking more economic opportunity, more economic upside, that is aligned with the idea of independence, the idea of having differentiated value and quality. So we're very interested in doing that. But my belief is we have to take a first principles approach and not just stuff ads.

Yeah. I think that the bare case for ads has been sort of dumb it down content or clickbait for the masses. The bull case has been sort of allows niche writers to monetize without charging their audience a ton or it doesn't succumb to audience capture in the same way that a subscription could. Basically there are pros and cons with both business models and you guys have to figure out how to integrate it in a way that works for the reader and the writer.