Substack Has A Problem

It's Time To Nip It In the Bud

As you may know, I’ve been around the block a few times and have been a content writer and Content Marketer for 20 years. I’ve seen what I am about to describe happen time and time again.

I don’t want it to happen here.

I wrote a note yesterday; you can read it here if you wish to comment (or restack it!).

In it, I talked about the Twitterification of Substack, which looks like a load of posts in my feed telling me how to grow on Substack.

I first noticed this back in 2006 on the Warrior Forum after it started to gain traction. Each day the majority of posts were focussed on how to grow and make money on the warrior forum.

Ultimately, it became known for those posts and very little else.

Who remembers Squidoo Lenses? … nope? Anyone? … There is a reason for that, and it’s what we are talking about. (they were around from 2005 -2016 when they got bought by Hubpages)

It happened on Twitter 3 or 4 years ago, an influx of marketers writing content about how to grow on Twitter.

Next, you’ll start receiving Masterclass and course offers on growing on Substack; you’ll see them in your feed every day.

Nothing is surer to kill the organic nature of a platform quicker than this.

It’s time to call out this behaviour before 80% of every post in your feed tells you how to grow on Substack.

Tip: If you want to grow on Substack, be yourself, engage with others, and post content that is genuinely helpful to your audience.

For transparency, I teach my subscribers, members, and audience how to build a content-based online business, so I should be all over these posts. However, I am happy to say I know that there is a better way to grow a business on a solid foundation that doesn’t require these types of posts.

To Clarify... It’s Not About Growth Tips

If you post tips about how you are growing, keep doing it. It only becomes a problem when you make your whole business about growing on Substack.

At this point, the recent influx is probably being driven by writers who are moving over from Medium since their “How to Grow on Medium” posts stopped gaining traction and the Twitterati bailing out as their audience is leaving in droves..

So, if you have good growth tips but your focus is elsewhere share them and keep doing what you are doing.

How You Can Help Stop This

Next time you see a post about growth on Substack, check out the recent posts from that account.

Are their notes all about Substack growth?

Are their newsletters all about Substack growth?

Do you need one more account that’s going to tell you how to grow?

If not, then unsubscribe and stop following that account.

(I’d even suggest finding one or two accounts that talk about Substack growth and only follow them… this isn’t about prohibition but moderation)

I’ve seen this so many times I can even tell you what will happen in the future:

The next step will be DMs asking you if you want help growing and then engagement groups, and then it’s gone too far.

My account on Twitter used to get DM’s daily asking me if I wanted help growing often from people with a small fraction of my followers.

Every few days the DM’s would be for a $20 a month Telegram group where everyone would like and comment on everyone else’s posts. These are easy to spot as people will start liking and commenting on random, diverse posts.

How Substack Can Help Stop This

I have no idea if these suggestions are possible, so cut me some slack!

Step one would be to make our main feed not have an algorithm and show us posts in the past 24 hours from people we follow. This would allow us to curate our own feeds with posts that interest us.

The discovery feed should then have an algorithm that shows us related posts to what we’ve commented on or liked plus posts the people we follow have liked.

For all I know this might already be in place and I just need to tweak my feed by liking and following more.

Rant Over

Ok, this angry old man has run out of bile, so I’ll end this rant here.

We have the ability to create the perfect writers and content creators platform here, where we see what we want to see and learn from those we want to learn from.

Get it right, and we have a platform where we all can grow, get it wrong, and we will be inundated with the same posts 80% of the time.

If you think the thoughts and sentiments in the post are worth sharing, please restack this post!

Ain’t No Pitch Here

Normally, I’d have an offer for my all-access pass here, but I am so self-aware that I realise it wouldn’t fit with this post. (That’s a big lesson there!)

But for those of you who already have it, or are VIP / Foundation Tier Subscribers good news…

I am planning to run a cohort next month and maybe into next year where I’ll help you to build your Content Business and give you all the insights from 20 years of doing this… details in the community… or just ask me!

Normal service will be resumed next week!

Have a great week

Mark