April 2025 - I Should be Into Substack
As a person who produces as much text as I do, I really should have a place to put it that's not a website buried on the internet. Personally, I avoid social media like the plague, because I think it genuinely brings out the worst in me. More often than not it also eats my time like nobody's business, so why should I let that particular devil into my home? Exposure, I guess? In all seriousness, I think I just about hit the limit of how I can improve without direct feedback, and places like reddit were just too depressing for me on the long run. This leaves places like Wattpad, which doesn't seem like it's geared for me, or just... Substack. I've not heard or read much about substack, but it seems at a glance like the "correct" thing for me. Now, historically I'm bad about posting, and while I want to kind of engage with this platform, I don't want it to burn any of my time that I would otherwise spend on other things. On the one hand, I have a backlog of short stories and poems, so I won't really need to take the time for drafting posts beyond a cursory proof-reading. I don't really understand the posting/commenting culture at a first glance, so that's what I'm aiming to figure out while lurking on the platform.
On the note of post-quality, at first glance the featured stuff is just infinitely more polished than I anything I've ever produced, and while I know that there's probably a pretty wide spectrum on substack as there is on every other platform, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Still, I figure best I can do is just get it over with and commit to posting. Now my short story output is a little polluted with vignettes from worlds I'm building/have built and while I hope the story still makes sense regardless, I suspect it will feel a little incoherent at first.
After using the mobile app of substack, I'm equal parts relieved, and also a little put off. It's heartening for me, because the quality of posts differs widely when scrolling, and that's probably on purpose, because of the way people can and want to engage with content on different devices. It does look a little more like twitter or Instagram on my phone which I'm not sure is good. That sentiment seems to be shared with at least a vocal section of its userbase, though some of those seem to want the platform to push slightly more toward reddit, which I'm also not fond of using. Then again, there's likely no winning in the attempt to make a social media platform palatable to me, seeing as most interactions on there scare me. Do I want to aspire to the kind of writer whose content gets read on desktop? Maybe. Currently, I'm not sure I can seriously put in the work and I suspect this will include some networking and chatting which I'm bad at, empirically. Considering my proclivities perhaps I could also benefit from a tumblr. but I feel like those are corners of the internet that I'd best avoid for now.
When I said that scrolling substack on a phone felt like twitter, I didn't know how that feeling would intensify. Not sure what information google or any other ad service gave them, but I regularly stumble across Zizek's substack, mostly containing 2008-deep quotes, sandwiched in between vaccine-denialism and somebody regurgitating any number of news articles likely already familiar to a reader who was interested in the topic in the first place. It's not that I'm strictly speaking unfamiliar with echo-chambers, but watching the substack algorithm trying to sort me into one, feels surreal. The more I see it, the less I'm sure I want to touch the platform at all. Then again, nobody is making me post. I should be able to just limit myself to posting a short story, or a NaNoWriMo write-up, or perhaps even a poem, since this seems the correct platform for it, every other week, or once a month, and then forget that comments even exist.
So what do I have to show at the end of the month? A substack account that's barely more active than before, and an uneasy feeling about now officially having one of these.