This is pretty much exactly my take on Substack and similar platforms:
…Substack has also changed, and Substack will continue to change, and these changes have been, and will be, perfectly platform-ish.
Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will continue to mold their work to fit Substack’s particular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their independent visions and ambitions. We learned this about platforms a long time ago: following the old newspaper schematic, they aren’t the printing presses, but rather the assignment editors.
I’m conscious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Substack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hundred bucks a month! Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think the standard for art is that it doesn’t just play the game, but invents it. On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow their Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
Read the whole thing — it isn’t even that long! — and remember that even if the thing you want to build is the same model as Substack’s, you don’t have to be on that platform to make that move. A successful Substack is, in the end, just a newsletter with an engaged audience that pays you for access to some of your thoughts. Substack got that idea from somewhere, and that somewhere was Stratechery, which is all built on the open web itself. You can do what Substack does in a beautifully integrated fashion on Ghost, or in slightly nerdier (but quite delightful) fashion on Buttondown, or with a bit of work you can wire it up with the combination of literally any blogging tool.
Even if Substack succeeds in becoming a large business (and remember: not all products are big companies), their interests and yours are unlikely to be well-aligned over time: indeed, the more so the bigger they become as a platform. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — play Substack’s venture capital platform game.