Substack is Splitting into Two Worlds

“I analysed 5369 Bestsellers. 97% all had this one one thing in common…”

If you’ve been here for a few months you have no doubt come across some variation of this headline. Notice how it plays into your human desire to be seen heard and recognised for your hard work. To feel as though the answer has finally been found and success is only one overlooked insight away.

Over time I started noticing that these kinds of posts were becoming increasingly common. Subscriber milestones. Notes strategies. Monetisation experiments. Endless discussions about growth. Every week there seemed to be another framework, system or lesson from someone who had supposedly cracked the code.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. I read plenty of those articles myself because I am genuinely interested in how people build successful publications. Growth is fascinating.

At the same time, I kept stumbling across something completely different.

Writers publishing deeply personal essays that clearly took weeks to think through. Reflections on class warfare, relationships, language and also just ordinary life. The conversations in the comments felt much more human and were filled with people building work they seemed determined to keep writing regardless of how many people happened to read it.

The longer I’ve spent here, the more I’ve started to feel that these are two very different ways of using the same platform.

Perhaps that is the real decision every writer eventually faces on Substack. Not “what is my niche?” but which world are you slowly become part of?

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“The new economic engine of culture.”

Substack markets itself as “the new economic engine of culture.” I have always found that phrase interesting because, at least in theory, it promises something quite different from traditional social media.

A place where writers can build direct relationships with readers and where the incentives are slower, calmer and more aligned with creating something of lasting value.

The difficulty is that every successful platform eventually develops its own culture and Substack is no different. It’s never coordinated and it doesn’t happen over night. One successful post gets copied. A growth strategy becomes conventional wisdom. One metric starts carrying more weight than another and before long, the behaviour that once felt unusual begins to feel normal.

This is simply how incentives work. Attention attracts attention. Success leaves clues. People naturally imitate what appears to be working, often without stopping to ask whether it is leading them towards the kind of work they actually wanted to create in the first place.

The Hidden Cost

Notes can help you grow, obviously. The same is true of recommendations, collaborations and every other strategy people discuss on here. They all have their place. But the question I keep returning to is much older than Substack.

What kind of person do your daily habits slowly create?

Every platform rewards a particular way of looking at the world. Spend enough time inside those incentives and they begin shaping your attention. You start noticing different things. Your values shift. You become sensitive to different signals. Before long, the platform is no longer just influencing what you write. It is influencing what you notice, what you think about and ultimately who you are becoming.

This is why Linked-in, TikTok, Instagram and the rest get so much hate here. Many people realised what those platforms were doing to their attention and taste and decided to get out while they still could.

I find that idea both fascinating and unsettling.

Writing has undoubtedly changed me. It helps me to untangle spiralling thoughts. I pay closer attention to conversations, ordinary moments and passing observations because they often contain the beginnings of an essay.

Living in Germany has taught me the same lesson. The more closely you observe everyday life, the more you realise that some of the most interesting things in life are hiding in plain sight. Most people overlook them because they are too busy or just wrapped up in their own thoughts.

That is the kind of attention I want to cultivate. The ability to notice and to stay curious. To think deeply enough that an ordinary experience becomes an insight worth sharing.

Every writer is being shaped by their practice. The only real question is whether that practice is leading you towards the kind of mind you actually want to continue to cultivate ten years from now.

A Centre of Gravity

This is why I keep coming back to the same idea.

You can spend years chasing reach, or you can spend those same years building a centre of gravity. By that I mean a place you can keep returning to regardless of what the platform is rewarding this week.

It is the gradual process of discovering what you actually believe, which questions refuse to leave you alone and what kind of work you want your name attached to. It is recognising your own ideas when they appear instead of immediately filtering them through somebody else’s strategy.

There is something incredibly calming about that. Make no mistake, growth will be slower. But the platform changes, the new features, and increasing incentives do not feel quite as unsettling when your work has its own centre of gravity. That is because you are no longer relying on the platform to tell you what is worth thinking about next.

I am convinced that readers sense this too. People don’t necessarily come back because every article is bigger or more insightful than the last but more because they know what kind of conversation they are stepping into. There is a consistency of perspective that slowly builds trust over time.

I suspect that is what many of us are really trying to build. Not another spike in attention, but a place where our thinking can deepen year after year, and where the people who find value in it have a reason to stay.

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Where This Leaves Me

I am not anti growth. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to grow.

Growth creates opportunities. It introduces your work to people who would never have found it otherwise. I want more readers just as much as the next writer.

The question is what sits underneath that ambition. Some people are trying to build attention. Others are trying to build a place where their thinking can deepen over time and the difference is not always immediately obvious.

Those goals often look identical in the beginning. Both people publish regularly. Both experiment. Both celebrate when an essay takes off. The difference only becomes visible years later.

One writer has become increasingly dependent on the platform. The other has become increasingly independent of it. Ironically, the second person often grows anyway.

I realise there is a certain irony in writing an article like this. Pieces about Substack tend attract discussion and become part of the very conversation they are questioning. I am aware of that contradiction because I benefit from it too.

The reason I keep returning to these ideas has very little to do with growth itself. I’m far more interested in what platforms encourage us to become. Every platform has its own values, whether they are written down anywhere or not.

Perhaps that is the real divide I have been noticing. It isn’t between writers who care about growth and writers who don’t. Most of us would happily welcome more readers. The difference, at least as I see it, is whether growth remains a consequence of the work or gradually becomes the work itself.

I don’t know where Substack will be in five or ten years’ time. I do know that I want to leave this platform thinking more deeply than when I arrived. If writing here slowly makes me more observant, more curious and more attentive to the world around me, then I suspect everything else will take care of itself.

All the best,

Ben