Will Substack go the way of Medium?

Art vs. Capitalism

I hope not, but only the

Substack

admins can stop it.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I wrote haphazardly on the Medium platform for just over 5 years. I had a modest following, made a modest side-gig income from it, and read many interesting writers. Like Substack, Medium started with a subscriber model – except that one subscribed to Medium itself at the rate of $5.00 per month.

Substack reversed that model. Here, readers subscribe to individual writers or publications.

In 2019 or thereabouts, I noticed that content quality on Medium began degrading. Maybe the platform noticed it too, or maybe revenue was down. Medium started recruiting well-known writers and publications, boosting pieces by individual writers to reward an idea of quality, and, briefly, offering a flat fee to writers like me to publish a certain number of pieces per month.

It seems that none of these methods worked for Medium, since the compensation model kept changing in a remarkable number of business pivots discussed in Casey Newton’s 2022 piece for Neiman Labs. Medium’s founder, Ev Williams of Twitter, who resigned in 2022, had always intended the platform to make money for him and investors, but he’d also intended Medium to be full of writing that readers wanted to read, a place where anyone could publish. A place like Substack at this moment, in the fall of 2023.

Medium still publishes credible writers, including Barack Obama who posted an opinion piece on the Israel – Hamas conflict. But much of the writing on Medium is still click-bait, crypto-scamming, and advice for making money. This is capitalism at work. Ev’s democratic ambitions were not compatible with his capitalist ambitions for the platform.

It’s an old conflict, the one between the pursuit of art (or science or democracy) and the pursuit of money. How can Substack avoid devolving into a platform that privileges capitalism over writing? I don’t know, but we writers cannot prevent it at scale. Only the Substack admins have the power to set policies that reward good writing more than they reward clicks.  

Here’s to hoping that the burden of attracting their own subscribers will be too heavy a weight for click-bait bots and SEO advice bros to bear.

*This post was inspired by Summer Brennan’s note on the competition anxieties she’s noticing on Substack, which reminded me of Medium’s decline. “Oh, no,” I thought.