Dear Republic,
Our debate this week is whether Substack is enshittifying or not. A. A. Kostas leads off with the full-throated pro-Substack position.
-ROL
SUBSTACK IS GOD’S GIFT TO AN UNDESERVING WORLD
There is nothing users of a social media site like more than to criticise the platform itself, calling out the founders and the employees, talking about how it used to be better back when they first joined, how there are too many people now, how new features are distracting, how disappointing it is that the platform is allowing celebrities to make profiles, etc. Aside from the few level-headed critiques that I’ve seen, most of this kind of ranting and raving on Substack strikes me as displaced forms of self-loathing or scape-goating (which are really the same thing). Why harangue the universe or God about your problems when you can take it out on the founders of a website which you like to use?
But putting to one side the utopian ideal of what a social media site should be in an increasingly gamified global economy, I think we can all admit that Substack has basically delivered on its promise to be a ‘new economic engine of culture.’ And for a website/app combo to achieve this feat in 2025, is it really surprising that it needs an in-built alternative to external social media feeds (the place where most people engage with the kind of media that Substack creators are making)? Is it shocking that with all the analytic tools Substack has layered on top of its basic foundation — an email newsletter service with a paid option — that it has added trending lists and subscriber badges and other ways to encourage readers to journey away from their private archipelagos of interests toward the sprawling map of continents available for their exploration? This is a media platform without advertisements (no small miracle), dependent upon readers deciding to patronise publications themselves. Without endorsing every decision made by the Substack team, I think a healthy dose of reality is needed to calm the general hysterics.
I quit all forms of social media during COVID, after I found my way to the end of Instagram’s so-called ‘endless scroll’ of Reels and realised I was at the digital equivalent of rock-bottom. And I’ve stayed off them, even deleting YouTube from my phone after it released its own version of reels. So I’m no social media apologist, I’m annoyingly against them. But if Substack didn’t have the Notes function, getting back on social media would be the only option to gain the kind of readership any of us have today. And I much prefer Substack over my publishing strategy back in high school, which consisted of me posting weird little humour essays on my personal Facebook page, attempting to be the lovechild of Dave Barry and Bill Bryson but stranded in suburban Canada. I think it’s safe to say that Substack is a much, much better place to both be a reader and writer, as well as a great place to learn how to mature as a writer.
But let’s get back to the company’s tagline — is Substack genuinely a ‘new economic engine of culture’? Is this an ecosystem capable of fostering new directions in literature and culture with the possibility of financial reward? Is this the soil from which interesting, unique, vibrant life is sprouting? Are we witnessing the growth of a new literary culture with both longevity and vitality? The answer is yes, to all of the above.
Objectively, Substack has given birth to a whole range of new, exciting literary publications that either did not exist a few years ago or had a much lower readership before joining Substack. The premier example is The Republic of Letters (obviously)1 but I am also partial to Romanticon, Inkwell, The Hinternet, Traces Journal, Apocrypha, After Dinner Conversation, and New Verse Review. There are so, so many Substack publications which are operating as online literary magazines in their own niches, that I sometimes forget there are places to publish poetry, fiction, essays, and/or reviews outside of the Substack ecosystem. To be honest, there is a diminishing utility to writing for publications without a Substack footprint, because this is where I cultivate a relationship with followers, subscribers, and casual readers. This is where everything gets consolidated. All roads lead to Substack.
And beyond the online journals and magazines, the ability to gain paying subscribers and thousands of regular readers has given rise to an incredible variety of projects launched by individual writers unconstrained by editors and publishing houses. We all know the celebrity journalists and authors who say they are on Substack for the sake of their ‘creative and intellectual freedom’, but I’m more interested in the fact that I can read a serialised novel about a henchman in the James Bond universe, listen to a regular podcast which interviews poets from all over the world, flick over to a multi-part theological essay, before immersing myself in a well-researched series on the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus. All of this work is being done by relative unknowns, and in a just world, all of this work would be upheld (and paid for) by traditional media publishing. But Substack has at least started tipping the scales back in the right direction.
What else? Well, the ‘social’ nature of Substack opens up the doors for collaboration and connection more than I ever thought possible. I first started publishing in journals and magazines back when you had to individually find publications you liked (or had heard were cool and pretended to like) and then email, or sometimes physically mail, your writing to them, and hope they liked it and published it and maybe paid you. And then that was it. There was no tail, no shelf life. You might have had a blog or website where curious readers could find your other writing (and who had the time/money to keep that regularly updated?), but there was no easy way to forge a relationship with these readers, to communicate with them, or even collaborate with them. Some of my favourite pieces on Substack have been collaborations, two or more writers working on an idea together, or a group of writers creating an anthology, or a blog with three authors who blend together, or a writer who holds essay contests and posts the results, or the many examples of one writer inviting another to guest post on a different subject matter than their usual fare. And because of the nature of the Notes feed, Substack disincentivises the temptation among literary types to coalesce into siloed and club-like ‘scenes’, usually defined more by how they are not like all the other groups than by why they actually need to exist. To again harken back to my youth, previously the only way to forge a community or collaborative practice within the literary space was to become part of a scene, or start your own ‘literary/cultural movement’ (with a long and sassy manifesto, of course). I’m not saying Substack doesn’t have literary scenes or circles or clubbishness, but there is a bubbling churn that occurs thanks to Notes. People bumping into each other, potential writer-reader relationships being formed. Sparks fly from these glancing contacts between individuals, and with Substack’s algorithm as the catalyst, we witness these sparks catch alight, fueling new literary projects. There can be no doubt that exciting new work of literary and cultural merit is being written every week on Substack that would otherwise be languishing somewhere less accessible, or never published at all.
It’s easy to hate on feeds and algorithms that seem to favour memes and AI photos and other slop. But the fact that every social media platform over a certain size devolves in some way is not necessarily indicative of problems with the platform, but indicative of human nature itself. People like uplifting platitudes and easy-to-digest jokes in pictorial formats. What is encouraging, though, is that they also seem to like long-form essays on the hellishness of MFAs and how to develop a better cultural taste and the end of our extremely online era. Instead of giving into the doomer fear of a sloppified Substack, I’d encourage us all to find a way to utilise the built-in social networking elements that millions of users enjoy.
Lastly, I’ll double down on a point I’ve already mentioned, which is that you can make money (actual money, paid by real people) from your work on Substack, and this doesn’t require you to hand over any creative control, accord with any editorial regimes, or sell-out by allowing advertising. This is incredible. Barely anybody in publishing is making any kind of real money, and they certainly aren’t doing it without several intermediaries and at least one soul-selling imposition. That a person like me, a nobody2 with no connections to anybody of importance, could theoretically buy a new coffee machine from the annual revenue I earn on Substack, is gobsmacking. This is better than I ever saw publishing with traditional journals, and the payments are instantaneous. Plus you get to directly interact with the people who are paying you. This cultural engine certainly seems economic to me.
So instead of wringing our hands about the downsides of social media, the formerly glorious state of Substack’s past, the negative aspects of online writing, the death of traditional media, the plummeting literacy rate, etc., why not spend our time and energy enjoying all that Substack makes possible? There’s no need for Substack to become another bottomless pit of brain rot. The only reason that will happen is if we all surrender to a certain way of being, cynically giving each other the slop we think we deserve. Most of us are here because we enjoy creating and reading and interacting with good, interesting writing. Long may it continue.
A. A. Kostas is a Canadian-Australian poet, writer, and lawyer (in that order), currently based in Singapore. He writes the Substack newsletter Waymarkers.
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