Thoughts For Sale

Mass-market intellectualism is an oxymoron, right? Ask Substack.

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.