Freeriding Substack
Weblog notes from May 10, 2026 that were compiled and shared.
This week the team over at The Verge is reporting that writers are fleeing Substack to avoid the cost of succeeding on the platform [1]. As a platform for delivering newsletters and other social connections, Substack only manages to make money if the authors are making money. They take a share and that is how the platform makes money. Honestly, the vast majority of the people on the platform are not paying monthly or yearly fees for newsletters or making money publishing. It’s the edges of the equation where the outliers are winning the new media publishing game and some people are certainly paying writers for regular publication. It’s something that I’m pretty sure is a good equation for a lot of writers that want to be a part of this grand experience of sharing the written word with others.
Keep in mind that for the last 5 years I have shared missives and I’m really just freeriding the Substack platform to host my content. Essentially, I’m a part of the social side of the experience. Some people get my newsletter for free and others see it as part of the posts feed or other social links. None of it is about spending money for me to be a writer. I made the decision to switch my weblog hosting over to Substack and have not looked back. I wanted to be part of an ecosystem and WordPress was not where I wanted to be anymore. The logical answer to the equation was to just go all in with Substack and see what happens. It appears that other writers who have built an audience are now fleeing to Ghost or Beehiiv. Full disclosure on this one I totally pay the yearly subscription fee to The Verge to listen to the podcasts without commercials. They also run my favorite podcast within a podcast.
Over the last couple of weeks my desire to write lengthy posts has been more limited. Normally on the weekend I will sit down and craft some prose and publish somewhere within the publications I have set up for that sort of thing. Writers take the time to write that is what distinguishes them from those who spend their time just reading. Certainly some writers who really do put in the time to write don’t actually have a large audience of readers and that in the grand scheme of things is perfectly aligned with the great attention economy. My interest as of late has been to write academic style papers and I have been sketching out some things I want to get put down on paper. As a go-forward strategy that is not really a solid path to larger readership as the best academic papers can maybe hope for 10,000 reads while some really good ones tap out at about 1,000 reads depending on interest within the academy.
My concerns about the future of the academy in general are real. I think that some very real changes are going to have to happen within the framework of publishing in academic journals. We stand on the shoulders of giants and each new generation of scholars has to contribute to pushing the academy forward as we advance our understanding of the world. Recently, the rate of contribution has gone up exponentially, but the quality of the contribution has degraded substantially. Like most of you I have a strong disdain for reading slop and the amount of that has become overwhelming to say the least. I’m probably going to keep being a freerider on Substack for the foreseeable future. I like the community that exists within the posts and the feed so far. My experiences with that have been positive and I generally run into writers that write their own content. That part of things is something I enjoy being a part of and over the last 5 years my overall experience has been very positive. That is probably not a universal experience, but it is what I have run into and I have not seen any real changes recently.
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv