5 Reasons Substack is Based
No other platform has done such a great job integrating key medium functions from the other mutually exclusive platforms.
Some of us still remember when “everyone” was on Myspace. That was prior to our parents getting online (beyond AOL, anyway). They did email, and we had social media.
Then, in a very short period of time, everyone moved to Facebook. Myspace became little more than a ghost mall.
Today, it is hard to imagine such mass migrations, because if everyone from Facebook were to go anywhere we wouldn’t want to be there ourselves. That has a lot to do with the medium itself.1
The question is, might some kind of mass migration be possible? And would that be something to look forward to?
We’re all hoping for some new kind of platform that would integrate the best aspects of the other platforms while countering their worst tendencies. Because Substack has more of a serious shot at achieving this than anyone else, I’m writing this as a tribute, in celebration of the new “long-form post” feature recently added to Android mobile.
5 Things I Love about Substack
It is easy to use and not buggy (ok mostly… there's a couple things I've run onto while writing this but they're not too bad).
Constant improvements! Unlike Facebook, X, and Threads, you can tell Substack puts their money where their mouths are. They keep investing in improvements to the medium and it shows.
Notes + Long-Form Posts is an amazing distinction that SHOULD be prioritized and built around. If “the medium is the message,” then notes are a very different message from long-form posts (it's the difference between publishing a text message and a full article). It is difficult for a site to do both, and it seems like Substack is succeeding where others have failed. Facebook used to be OK for longer-form social posts, before it got oversaturated with random lurkers and distant family members or aquaintances, which resulted in too many people wrecked by social anxiety to post or say what's actually on their minds. Blogger and Medium were for the DIY article vibe, and less like a mainstream social network, and neither attempted to incorporate the notes function. Twitter was strictly the short “notes” style place, which it succeeded at until it became oversaturated by self important PMCs who had no qualms with the CIA telling their platform who to shadow ban. Now X wants to be both, but its “long-form posts” are just articles that look like tweets, and you have to pay to make them, whereas Substack is rendering sites like Medium and Blogger irrelevant while simultaneously paying its authors, the literal opposite of X (side note, the way it sets up subscriptions could, in the long-run, also render irrelevant any reliance on Patreon). X will never manage to do what Substack has achieved. (Aside: At this point, Musk should probably sell X to Substack at a discount if he cares about free speech, and then they could incorporate its users into their superior interface… same goes for Rumble). And let's be honest, Threads is just for people who hate Musk so much that they left X, which means it is for the only group of people more insufferable than Musk fans, i.e. people who miss Twitter.
Bringing video and podcast and livestream together into a site that is already built around independent writers and the distinction between Notes and Long-Form Posts. Absolutely incredible idea and if they succeed at integrating all these functions they will be the first site to do so. This could render YouTube and Twitch irrelevant, which is desperately needed right now. Those sites are way too censorious because YouTube sold out to mainstream advertisers and MSM a long time ago, and Twitch is literally built by Amazon to exploit and foster communities of lifestyle ADHD 35 year old gamers who act like they're teenagers… it has potential, but that potential has been squandered. If the medium is the message, then those platforms offer little more than Democrat Wal-Mart. The alternative has been Rumble, which is worse in almost every way except you can say it’s “retarded” and you won't get banned (what a privilege!). It doesn't appeal to the intellect or foster more thoughtful discourse.
Anti-censorship. Its firm stance on free speech is not without bounds, but Substack is very hesitant to terminate accounts. This is a difficult line to walk. They have been mass boycotted by the kinds of “journalists” who went to Threads. They call Substack fascist because it lets a million flowers bloom. This has positive and negative effects, but so long as it errs on the side of ideological diversity and protecting disagreement and discourse, I think Substack may truly succeed in becoming The Platform of the next decade—and maybe even of the century.
Theory Underground has not gone all in yet. We are still spread out across many platforms. The fact is, even if Substack can functionally replace all those other platforms while integrating (sublating!) their best aspects, TU is currently ten steps ahead of any of the functions made possible even when those become combined (as we proved in our last EMSTU).
I'd love to visit their HQ and meet the programming team, interview some of the minds behind things, and see if they're interested in going where we are—this would render irrelevant Zoom and Discord as well while simultaneously creating a new kind of Internet previously unimagined.
My biggest immediate hope is that livestreaming on Substack becomes possible via OBS and not just a live button on the mobile app. We want to restream to YT, Twitch, Kick, and Substack, but potentially also Rumble, X, and Instagram. We want to funnel from all those other sites to our own site and subscriber base.
If Substack can keep doing what it has been doing and staying several steps ahead of all its competition while protecting the diversity of opinion, then I could see funneling all those other users to Substack instead of our own site, until those other platforms become as dead as MySpace.
Thank you for reading.
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Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
Something about Facebook and its conception of human connection, friendship, and networking, became fundamentally opposed to both the face of the Other (in a Levinasian sense) and books (as a metonym for intellectual discourse, in this case).
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