Substack is social media

(reposting older post from October, 2025)

So says Hamish McKenzie, which is funny since one of the things Substack said about itself years ago was that they were the antidote to social media. Remember those heady days of 2021-ish when it was “quality over quantity” and writers could go directly to their readers’ inboxes and skip the icky mess of Twitter and the like? Yeah me too.

Then of course Substack added Notes as a way to keep people on the platform. Now McKenzie is just saying out loud what everyone knows while of course trying to note how it’s different. It is no different. In fact in the Notes of the article linked above one can see how so-called “conservatives” are chiming in about their conservatism when nobody is asking for their political viewpoints. Of course some MAGA types also had to note their allegiance.

Yeah Hamish, it’s so different it couldn’t be avoided in your own post about how different you think it is 😆

Update: Kathryn Vercillo wrote about this back in July. She says as an edit at the beginning:

It’s a strange quirk of the algorithm that people are finding this and it’s my most noticed and commented on article. Although it doesn’t surprise me because my biggest challenge with Substack is that it is an echo chamber in which people on the platform seem to always talk about the platform.

Except I doubt it’s a strange quirk. It’s the stuff people want to read. Anytime I’ve gotten an inordinate amount of readership on my own blogs (not on Substack, just in general) it’s been because I wrote about some sort of conflict.