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 prideful, 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 no ads. The product is getting heavy in the process, and perhaps it’s been overvalued—but as someone who’s built media products, been a power user of nearly 4 years, and a so-called “bestseller” on the platform, I’m mostly bullish—it has the cultural momentum.
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?
Substack’s dilemma is that of every platform with the ambition to build a better culture. It must evolve to survive (and grow into its valuation), but leaning into shorter-form, lower-brow formats to keep the flywheel spinning risks eroding what made it special to begin with.
In a typical Act III, Substack would abandon intellectualism entirely. But it has an edge—a potential way out: the inbox is still Substack’s secret weapon.
Its direct creator-to-subscriber model can temper the algorithmic flattening that plagues other platforms. E-mail as a channel allows high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow content to coexist while unbundling the identity of each creator from Substack, the brand. It also lets me sidestep the app and stay blissfully unaware of its social-media-ification—if I choose. (If I were running Substack, this is the needle I’d try to thread.)
The other thing to consider: the market for truly high-brow content may be limited, but the market for aspirationally high-brow audiences—people who want to feel smarter, deeper, more connected—is huge.2 People often dump on “middle-brow,” but I see it as a phenomenal position to be in at scale. As one writer put it:
“[I use] “middlebrow” in a positive sense. I view it as an important part of how ideas are circulated in our culture among different strata of society (specifically, among groups with varying levels of wealth, education, and access to “high” or “avant-garde” culture).”
And, of course, in a world where a fuller spectrum of content sophistication, depth, formats, and topics start to exist in the same place, the business model will evolve. Simply taking 10% on paid subscriptions won’t do. Either that percentage goes up, they introduce more of a Netflix model (e.g. bundled subs for one price), they capture more affiliate / sponsorship value already being created … or ads.
Consumers will adapt, they always do, but this risks eroding the unique value proposition of independence and ownership for creators—another big issue with a tiny needle to thread.
If Substack succeeds, it won’t just be a victory for new media—it’ll offer hope for how we value thought in an era dominated by content slop and clicks. If it fails, we’ll sigh and call it inevitable, just another casualty of the attention economy.
As someone who analyzes Substack, its push toward becoming a hybrid social media giant is a compelling rewrite of the typical path. But as a writer on the platform, it’s an exhausting proposition. I don’t want to trade long-form essays for viral formats or be pulled into the visibility hamster wheel of Big Social. (Introducing advertising would be the final shoe to drop.)
And for all the talk of identities, I was a 'writer' before Substack, and I’ll be one after. I just want to write and have people read it and value it. So getting caught up in the platform’s attention games—chasing metrics or curating a “Substacker” identity—is a trap I’m determined to avoid. We don’t need another stage; we need a tool with meaning and a society we want to belong to.
Thoughtful media™ deserves a home—and for now, it’s Substack’s to lose. It has the cultural momentum.
I have a lot more thoughts on this that I cut out for the sake of brevity, but I’d love to discuss in the comments. And if you liked this essay, give it a like and share with a friend or community that might too. If my writing is new to you, here’s a list of all my essays.
Given the funding and valuation, Substack has a better chance closing the gap with value generated from something other than subscription revenues x the 10% take rate. There are only so many ways this could work out mathematically, but if I had to guess, the focus is on winning the cultural relevance war first, and at least on that front, it might be ahead of schedule.
Longer-form is almost inherently higher-brow through intention and effort, so Substack can’t go full-on short-form or it’ll lose the intellectualism and sophistication fast (which is starting to be seen on Notes.)
Kind words 🙏 lots written so more to publish soon!
AirBnb analogy is quite compelling, haven’t heard that one before, thanks for sharing.
Agree There is an oxymoron in prospect of taste or high-brow or belonging scaling, but I see Substack wants and needs to scale … Something will have to give.
I’ve largely had positive experiences on Substack too, but I see a big shift happening now. The savior so far is the inbox, I can ignore what’s happening on the app. But every “creator” will sense the tipping point where that ignorance goes from neutral to a disadvantage. Staying tuned …
I've been missing your essays, Anu. Great to have you back here (and the wait was worth it).
Can taste scale? When I worked at Airbnb, The Verge published a scathing critique of Airbnb's impact on global taste, labeling the emerging aesthetic of bland as "AirSpace". From interior decor to high street shops, the AirSpace was colonizing cities across the world. It's unfair to lay all the blame on Airbnb, of course – it's an inevitable result of taste makers going viral on visual media, and entrepreneurs trying to profit off that taste. de Tocqueville identified the mass market-ification of taste and craft as early as Democracy in America; the web just radically decreases taste's half life.
You write "Substack sells intellectual taste as cultural currency and contemporary belonging." The statement is rife with tension. Can taste survive "selling"? Does "belonging" risk the differentiation that taste (sometimes) requires?
Unlike nearly any other web property, Substack sits squarely in a positive column for me. I've benefited so much from reading essays like this one that I never would have discovered in the past. RSS feeds, Medium articles, Twitter links – nothing has exposed me to more, better writing and interesting ideas than Substack.
But you're right that writing isn't really the point. Intellectual taste and community is. Writing is just the medium that expresses this taste most consistently (writing is thinking, yadda yadda).
Now the test is whether intellectual taste and community can withstand the pull of market forces. I'll keep my fingers crossed.