Substack is dying, all other “Social Networks” already dead

memento mori

I was going to write a post about how Substack is obviously dying, but then I remembered that all internet social networks have a life expectancy of about five years.

All of the networks that had an “it” moment and then fizzled to nothing: AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Usenet was pretty good. Facebook was never even alive in my opinion. Believe it, Skype just hung up for good last week! Want to see search engine portal cemetery, here. But there was also Tumblr that Yahoo paid a billion for (and Yahoo! itself). There was Blogger and MySpace. Of course, Twitter died and became an X who in turn gave birth to xAI. There was WordPress.com that had an ambition but never really took off. One might say it’s a curse, but I think we seek something deeper that the internet can’t deliver… With the advance of AI, Google is dying too…

I shamefully admit that I used all of the above (except Myspace and Tumblr), even built a new blogging platform in Drupal. Don’t worry, super hot for a second Drupal is dead too now. At least some dead had evocative, beautiful names, but “Substack”, common…

There will be a special place in hell for Substack. First, it’s a free for authors service, proving once more that if it’s free, you are the product. There was an active grift, deception, when authors that already had a significant audience were paid and promoted to switch to the platform. Creating the impression that it was a “career path” for many, LOL.

Then there is the dubious leadership of Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie. There are accessible here on Notes. So you can almost ask them a question or follow their thinking, to realize they have no clue.

In desperate and frantic moves to be something apart from a long form publishing, they created Notes and Chat, instantly killing already frail comments. Comments are the lifeblood of a blog. You kill comments, the blog dies. The “likes” be damned. They even tried to be TikTok when people thought it will be shot down.

Payments are the key to this platform. You think these two “leaders” would take payments in-house, instead of wasting resources on stupid projects like Notes and Chat, etc. But no, you have to log into overcomplicated Stripe, that takes a fee and limits the min you can pay. That min is too expensive. The cost of subscription should not be more than $10-15. There should be an option to pay $1 if you prefer.

The platform is a tool. Astonishingly, there were no substantive updates since I started. Only cosmetic bullshit. The stats are just awful, and there appears to be a drive to hide them even more. There are many things that don’t work. I tried to appeal to the support. There used to be an email support that is now turned over to a bad AI. You actually had a sense that someone was listening to the feedback. Begin by telling Hamish that you have a suggestion, he has no idea what you're even talking about. His woke political views are another story.

Speaking of dead… Nah, I would have to limit myself to the graveyard of the internet only…