SubStack Navel-Gazing

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/substack-navel-gazing-and-briefly>

In which I turn my gaze inward...
why the weblogging Renaissance under the guise of SubStacking?:
What Does SubStack Say That Its Mission Is?:

Hamish McKenzie: Welcome, Facebook and Twitter. Seriously: [When] we started Substack��� we were concerned about��� the attention economy���. Our addiction to social media is having negative effects on both individual and collective thought��� doomscrolling��� rage-monsters��� conspiracy theory-addled mob[s]��� poisoned information supply���. We have set out to show that platforms that put writers and readers in charge are just better. Substack��� a calm space that encourages reflection��� free of advertising or any other distraction��� no addiction-maximizing feeds, autoplaying videos, or retweetable quote-retweets to suck you into a psychological space you never asked to be in���. Information��� put into your brain based on��� writers [who] reward your trust, not��� a dopamine hit��� performative posturing���. Calmness��� is the real killer feature���

LINK: <https://blog.substack.com/p/welcome-facebook-and-twitter-seriously>

SubStack is��� classical weblogging���but. What is the ���but���? The ���but��� is:

A very aggressive push of the post to the email inbox of the recipient, rather than waiting for the recipient to come surfing by, with perhaps an rss-flag tickler to remind readers to come by. A subscription email with a website attached, rather than a website with a push RSS feed attached.

A very, very aggressive focus on what used to be called the tip jar, which hath now fed upon that meat upon which C��sar doth feed and grown great, and morphed into a paywall.

A focus on longer-form���a newsletter rather than a log of readings and reactions. (That, however, may not turn out to be the stable form of whatever medium it turns into: Adrian Hon���s <http://mssv.net> used to have three columns���links with a phrase or a sentence, paragraphs, and essays.)

SubStack is���like Medium <http://medium.com> before it���at one level an explicit reaction to the consumption and destruction of what appeared to be a growing weblog-based public sphere by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and company���each of which consumed part of the space, and each of which succeeded in generating superior dopamine-hit random-reinforcement engagement, which turned what I at least regarded as a functional and improving intellectual ecosystem into: the Net of a Million Lies.

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I guess the game is to return Facebook to its role of posting updates for family and friends; to turn Twitter into SubStack���s comment section, and to, as Hamish writes up top, provide ���a calm space that encourages reflection��� free of advertising or any other distraction��� no addiction-maximizing feeds, autoplaying videos, or retweetable quote-retweets to suck you into a psychological space you never asked to be in������

Will it work? Probably not. Can it be worse than Zuckerberg���s or Dorsey���s firehoses of fear-generating misinformation? Almost surely not. Thus it is, I think, worth trying.

As Noah Smith said on the inaugural edition of our Hexapodia podcast <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-i-relief> <https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/47874.rss>, we have already tried everything else, with less persistent success than Sisyphus.

 

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& more on what we hope to do with our Hexapodia podcast in the future���

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SF Masterworks cover of Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AVUMIZ> <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?1952>. Boris Vallejo did the first cover���I do not know who did this one.