Literary Substack Has No Future Unless It Creates One

... and I Wish I Knew How to Do That

In 2005, blogs were cool. In 2025, blogs are dead, embarrassments to their authors. The world has moved on. Why write a 1,500-word essay (too long!) when you can make it a 37-minute Youtube essay with stock video? Blogs are dead, except on Substack. Here, there is a fighting chance—maybe—that something so perennially uncool but also evergreen as the written word might thrive. But I’ll be truthful. I’ve looked at the numbers, and they aren’t promising. The growth of literary Substack is fueled by disappointment and rage at the oppressive mediocrity of traditional publishing—the written word stopped mattering to New York a long time ago; all they do is count followers and amplify existing platforms—but rage peters out. On its own, it doesn’t build anything that lasts. The problem Substack has, if it wants to be relevant in writing five years from now, it has not yet solved: discoverability at scale. We’ll discuss the issue at length, but let’s talk first about two (temporary) success cases: Twitter and Quora.

Twitter

Twitter succeeded in 2006 and Bluesky, launched in 2023, will fail. Bluesky is a far better product, but we live in different times, and “it’s like Twitter, but you start again at zero followers” is something no one wants.

Twitter, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, was fun. People joined who didn’t have platforms because, at the time, it didn’t seem to be about that. The stakes were low, and that’s crucial. When the stakes are high, everyone wants to have an audience but no one wants to be an audience, and then it’s no fun for anyone. Deliberate platform building (ugh, the mandatory positivity) isn’t enjoyable—it’s a miserable shitfucking grind—and, once there are too many platform builders, no one is having fun. Although late-2000s Twitter’s recommendation algorithms were primitive by today’s standard, good content had a chance—a small one, at least—to travel. I’ve been writing long enough to know when what I’ve written is nothing special, when it’s good, and when it’s fucking good. You can’t really reach the fucking good level (and that was never Twitter’s point) in 140 characters but, if you could hit pithy and somewhat good, you could gain six or eight new followers despite being a nobody. That’s not the case anymore. Twitter/X is overrun by people buying reach and I don’t really know why anyone would spend time there, except in a context of rage, desperation, or addiction.

The most destructive decision the site made is probably its algorithmic penalization of external links. In the late 2000s, Twitter wasn’t interesting content—the 140-character limit applied to everyone—but, instead, it was where one went to find interesting content, because other people would post it. It was a search site; when people spend hours on a search site and don’t leave, that’s failure. Today’s Twitter’s goal, however, is to keep people stuck there for as long as possible. Interesting discussion is deceased, unless you’re into cryptocurrency and right-wing techbros. Ultimately, it’s a platform that exists unto itself, and those don’t stay interesting for long.

Bluesky isn’t bad technology. I’m sure it’s far better than Twitter ever was. It won’t build a community, though, because it’s 2025, and “a new Twitter where you start with zero followers” is something it’s impossible to make oneself care about. People joined Twitter in 2006 because it was silly and fun and having zero followers didn’t bother you in the initial phases; platform building wasn’t the point. Now, it’s the only reason to use the damn thing. The main reason people are moving to Bluesky is that they despise Elon Musk. I get it. But rage, as I said, doesn’t sustain itself at a useful level for long enough to build communities. It either escalates or it dies out.

Quora

I’m putting my respectability at risk by having anything positive to say about what is now one of the worst sites on the Internet, but I’ll vouch for that, in the early 2010s, Quora was actually… good. The company put real human effort (possibly unsustainable) into curation, which meant that good writing got discovered. Most voting sites (e.g., Reddit) value only timing and glib bullshit; this also means that comment sections are defined by people who read quickly or not at all. Quora, on the other hand, got it right for a little while. I was a nobody (still am, löltz, because I’m bad at meta, but that’s another story) but managed to hit 9,000 followers on the strength of my writing—something that simply does not happen in the 2020s. The technology was still junk—slow, buggy Javascript with an unconscionable amount of user tracking—but good answers got found (as opposed to Reddit, where only timing matters) and this incentive to produce quality meant that, contrary to the usual trend, it could be found. There was a better than 50 percent chance, if a question was interesting and well-asked, of the top answer being useful.

And what is Quora today? SEO sludge, stalkers, and white supremacists. Quora deliberately enshittified at record speed—a textbook platform rug pull. In 2014, they took investment from Y Combinator, an unscrupulous but undeniably powerful startup incubator, and obviously this came with conditions. The site’s best writers were once courted and supported; afterward, they were deliberately abandoned. Some were even banned. It took fifty years for traditional book publishing to go derelict from the cultural responsibility it had taken on; Quora did it in fifty weeks. The site is now such absolute fecal garbage that I’m embarrassed to know that it exists.

Still, Quora gave me hope, in the early 2010s, that technology could be used to discover good writers—something we’d all benefit if it could do, because existing curators in traditional institutions don’t even read. Could it have lasted? We’ll never know. It found good writers relative to its format—it was once a high-quality question-and-answer site—but abandoned them so quickly, its legacy is digital refuse. I would like to believe that quality is economically sustainable; in today’s platform economy, however, I have seen no proof of it.

Substack

In 2025, Substack has good writers. The ingredients of community are all present. The problem is that the site has not figured out discoverability. Substack is great if you already have a platform. If you are talented and trying to build a platform? It does very little. As I said, I’ve been writing long enough to know when my work is just okay, when it’s good, and when it’s off-the-charts good, and… quality doesn’t really move the needle here. There was a time online when a good essay increased one’s follower count by several hundred. Today? You might get one or two and, when the numbers are that small, you don’t even know why.

This is worsened by the fact that the rest of the Internet is so awful these days. Substack could serve as a hub of stability, if the rest of the web still functioned properly, but where else would someone build a platform that could be steered here? Twitter/X, which has been overrun by Nazis and porn accounts? Reddit, half of whose mods are stealth publicists or state-level actors? Facebook, which is literally Facebook? There are no good options.

The platform economy has murdered literature. Self-publishers will never attain visibility unless they play a game that has nothing to do with writing, and traditional publishing—it has been decades since anyone in the book industry has ever led; today, they are followers of trends others create—has fallen into the same trap; the reason literary agents don’t read is that they don’t need to, since counting followers tells them everything they need to know about whether they’ll be able to drive a book deal. People who want something different have gathered here, for sure, but unless Substack solves its discoverability problem, or someone does it for them, we will not find each other reliably and for long enough for it to matter.