Intellectualism Goes Mass-Market
Substack wants to be the final boss of the creator economy, even as it cringes at the term itself.
This is an essay about Substack—where it’s been, what it stands for, where it wants to go, and how I think it tackles getting there. In short, Substack wants to scale to all content formats, not just long-form writing, and it wants to do that while keeping its brag-worthy, high-brow reputation in tact. On the business side, it wants to offer the promise of YouTube meets OnlyFans— direct creator-to-audience subscriptions with great discovery, but adamantly, no ads. The product is getting heavy in the process, and perhaps it’s been overvalued in the past—but as someone who’s built media products, been a power user in some way for nearly 4 years, is a so-labeled “bestseller” on the platform, and especially as someone who has ‘takes,’ I’m mostly bullish—Substack has the cultural momentum.
Note: I’m not affiliated with or an investor in the company and don’t depend on it for any significant income; I have tested many versions of writing on and Substack and may again in the future.
These days, I subscribe to newsletters more than I follow people on social media. Some are impulse buys, others are carefully chosen—and a few feel indispensable. Substack has worked its way into my budget alongside Netflix and YouTube. I pay ~$20 a month for newsletters; I’m proud to support writers and to say so.
Substack hasn’t just made me a subscriber; it’s turned me into a willing participant in the marketplace of internet intellectualism.
That’s the platform’s real magic trick—turning ideas into products, writers into entrepreneurs, and newsletters into status symbols.
Its founders call the business model “magic dust”— helping writers own their communities, monetize their work, and ensuring the platform profits only when they do. But how does the famous Charlie Munger quote go? “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” Substack’s success doesn’t depend on better writing; it depends on better marketers of writing.
Substack wants to be the final boss of the creator economy, even as it cringes at the term itself.
For Silicon Valley, it’s a bet on a shift from creators chasing visibility to ownership. (Substack’s $600M valuation on just $20-30M in revenue shows the scale of belief in its potential, and the big gap it must close, somehow, to meet expectations.)1
Substack sells intellectual taste as cultural currency and contemporary belonging.
Who you read—and pay to read—is a budding social signal, a way to broadcast sophistication and align you with a niche intellectual tribe.
Substack’s promise is that the best writing will rise to the top. But, in reality, the best writers—on Substack or anywhere else—aren’t just creators of content; they’re mirrors for aspiration, revealing something readers feel, think, or want to become.
This is why Substack isn’t just a publishing platform; it’s a marketplace for identities, where the product isn’t just the newsletter but the writer and the reader themselves, locked in a cycle of aspiration and affirmation.
In Act I, Substack was for inbox intellectuals.
Nerds and professional nerds in journalism, tech, politics—people whose identities were already tied to thinking and reading and writing. Substack worked for them because they were already living in their inboxes.
In Act II, Substack wants to bring intellectualism to everyone else.
Substack is expanding beyond email into multimedia territory—courting creators and audiences from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more places where mainstream internet culture lives.
Intellectualism as a brand is aspirational. For creators caught in the churn of viral content and follower counts on noisy, lower-brow platforms, Substack offers something different: substance with monetization, bundling prestige with profit.
Its latest manifesto echoes a future where long-form writing may take a back seat, and the medium is just the machinery powering a more diverse class of creatives:
“[New] creators aren’t always going to have a written component to their Substacks. They might instead attract subscribers through chats or live-streamed videos on the app. They might focus on long-form videos, films, or podcasts.”
This is Substack taking on YouTube, and by extension taking on everyone else chasing YouTube head-on, but with the trump card of all formats, direct monetization, and no ads.
Imagine YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Discord, and OnlyFans had a baby … and that baby’s all grown up now and hooking up with Substack … their lovechild would be the aspirational Substack 2.0.
Substack is now building its own algorithms, promising “an ecosystem that blends the best of social media with the best of traditional media.”
This actually sounds like the “alternative” platform that everyone’s looking for right now … the decrying of Twitter / X (I’m still bullish) and the shortfalls or Threads and Bluesky (there’s a more unique content and community inventory on Substack already). Then there’s the impending will-they-or-won’t-they Tiktok ban.
The complete choose-your-own-adventure infrastructure for creatives sounds charming too. But in practice, it also feels like Substack is on a collision course with Big Social. (Will it evolve into just another social media platform with a newsletter feature?)
We can give new versions of things new names that feel good, but in the end, the medium is still the message.
Yet, this shift is probably smart, maybe even necessary. But it’s also messy. Writers are now leaning into viral formats like listicles, roundups, and traffic-bait headlines. They spend time upskilling on new features so they’re not left behind. Substack Notes feels like a watercooler in an office where everyone’s job is … Substack.
At scale, I suppose performative thought isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.
But the authentic intimacy promised by a thousand newsletters starts to feel forced. Add AI into the mix and writing doesn’t seem as proprietary and defensible a product as it once was either. Are you reading the words of your favorite writer, their intern, or their intern’s ghostwriter?
As Emily Sundberg deftly noted:
“Substack is making everyone into writers the way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference … the point of Substack is to get you to monetize your content … Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.”
The creeping sameness, the flattening of infinite voices into a handful of SKUs is the cost of writing-for-everyone as a business.
Substack used to feel like a cozy book club for intellectuals, and I’ll admit I liked that vibe. Substack now feels like a sprawling bookstore—the kind with an entire Starbucks inside—where you head straight for the quiet corner upstairs, only to find all two chairs already taken. Now they’re installing TVs everywhere … and a lot more people are about to show up.
Substack’s tagline— “a new economic engine for culture”—hides a paradox: high-brow and high-growth rarely coexist.
There’s a default path to scale. Whether it’s Instagram pivoting to video or Twitter … also pivoting to video, the promise of depth often collapses under the weight of mass adoption.
Does high-brow scale? Mass-market intellectualism is an oxymoron, right?