I’m on Substack.
Duh, obviously. But I actually joined a few years ago, and this is why.
I’ve written enthusiastically and regularly all my life, with no expectation of remuneration or publication, and since 2008 on Blogger. Bless it. (I still do, actually. I find its refusal to modernise at odds with the rest of my corner of the creative world, but comforting — like the last fragments of a MySpace and AIM world). I was so excited to join Medium in 2014, posting a story I’d written in secret ten years prior, which I’d never shown anyone because I loved it and it was very personal but was probably all kinds of literarily clumsy.
Medium was modern and fresh from the outset, offering up a wide and rich assortment of topics both within and outwith the section of Venn diagram I inhabit. It felt like a unique, smart haven for proper long-form writing and reading with a criteria and fair and reasonable quality threshold (if memory serves, I think I even had to apply and ‘be accepted’ into the Medium Partner Programme). Perhaps I felt like I’d graduated from a stickered-up diary written earnestly in myriad fountain pen colours to a tiny spot in the Guardian. I don’t know. Perhaps it would help my writing improve, or I might take it more seriously (PERHAPS even other people would!)
But as seems maddeningly inevitable on ‘platforms’ of all types, it slowly changed. I began to watch worried from the corner of one eyeball as more and more of this flavour of title began to appear:
and it crept toward a distressingly repetitive slurry pit of AI bros, articles of ambiguous origin (human? bot?) yelling in an oddly staccato voice about its “9 and a half ways to make money using AI”, or throwing down the 13 side hustles I can do while sitting at the beach, peddling hard the bullshit of passive income, or yelling some bland listicle about what we’re all doing wrong (laziness, over-working, trying too hard, not trying hard enough, existing…)
At whom, I’m not sure, to be honest. Then more shouting, with the relentless caps at the start of every headline word, formatting which began to make my eyes ache and which reads like something loud and opinionated:
There’s that word again…easy. Oh and the other one — productive. Hmmm. Clearly, I’m doing everything wrong because I am not, right now, on a beach with an iPad, hot dog legs and a million in the bank, but there are four hundred and twenteen people on Medium who can’t wait to school me on why that is.
I’ve tried to curate my feed a little better, but I still can’t shake the feeling of discomfort that swells up from being met head-on with this stuff when I log into my account. So rather than keep bumping up against all that (any platform we engage with is not merely to be ‘survived’, after all) I’m putting my energy into my 4-year-old Substack. I’ll still be copying my articles to Medium - yes, and to Blogger - but I’ve got subscribers here , paid ones, too. The occasional fiver aside, it’s nice. Not ‘nice’ as in safe, or devoid of challenging topics, or because everyone’s like me or thinks like me, god forbid — no; it’s just, GOOD here.
