Why I Am Not Using “Notes”
Notes&
Threads&
Chats
A few people have asked recently why I don’t post any “Notes” on Substack from This Week in Sound, my newsletter. “Notes” are a feature of Substack, the tool I currently use to publish This Week in Sound. I moved my newsletter over from TinyLetter after I maxed out that service’s subscriber-count ceiling, all for the best since TinyLetter was finally, at the end of February 2024, shut down by MailChimp, which had purchased it a year or so after it was created, well over a decade earlier.
The question about my Substack Notes non-activity makes sense, as I am active (on weekdays) on social media, and Notes is, in essence, a social media platform. There are two main reasons I haven’t used Notes yet: focus and confusion.
First, focus: A newsletter is, to me, a distinct form of communication — from blogs, from social media, from podcasts, from freelance journalism, from book-writing, etc. I also happen to think it’s an optimal one, perhaps because I came of age in an age of print periodicals. (I started my first email newsletter, epulse, in 1994, when I was an editor at Tower Records. It ran, with some interruptions, for a decade.) When I signed onto TinyLetter, having previously mostly used Majordomo and the bcc line for newsletter publishing, it was, to me, a classic mode of one-to-many communication, essentially a form of broadcast. When I later went looking for a new newsletter tool, having foreseen the end of TinyLetter, much of the competition provided much more than a newsletter. Many newsletter tools essentially wanted to take over the concept of me having a website. I elected to use Substack as a singular tool, one among many, my other main one being WordPress (on which Disquiet.com is published).
The Notes tool within Substack strikes me less as a tool for people on Substack to use to communicate with their readers and each other, and more as a tool for Substack to evolve a system that locks in its users, who will eventually find their varied forms of communication (Substack also hosts podcasts) all not just in a single basket but intractably intertwined.
Along those lines, I discerned that several readers wanted nothing to do with Notes. They just wanted to read a newsletter. Perhaps they are in the minority, but I feel an affinity with their disinterest. To post Notes on Substack seems to send a signal to newsletter readers that they’re missing out if they don’t read the Notes. As a kind of reverse of that, I make a habit each Saturday of posting, on Disquiet.com, and in reduced form the following Tuesday in This Week in Sound, what I wrote the week prior on social media. I call this my Scratch Pad, as that is how I see social media: as a scratch pad where one works out ideas in public. I later repost, in collated blog/newsletter form, the material for several reasons, one being that my knowing I will do so keeps a bit of a self-editing damper on my activity, the other being that readers won’t feel like they’re missing out on stuff if they don’t participate in social media.
Second, confusion: Substack didn’t merely add Notes to its core utility of sending newsletters — which it calls “Posts,” despite that being a word more closely associated with blogging (though you could argue it has an association with the idea of “post”ing a letter). Substack also has “Chats” and “Threads.” I will state now that I remain perplexed by the differences between these — and if I can’t comprehend the distinctions, then I can’t make creative use of the platforms.
It says something about seeming fungibility of Substack’s various sub-platforms that the site dedicated a page to distinguishing them from each other (actual post title: “What is the difference between Notes, Chat, and Threads?”). The piece reads a bit like the Taco Bell menu: similar ingredients, different proportions, questionable health benefits. For example, per that actual Substack help page, Notes are “published to your Substack profile and shared with subscribers,” whereas Chats is for “private messages sent only to subscribers” and Threads are “discussion threads to help tap into the energy of your readerships.” Suffice to say, that doesn’t exactly clear things up.
Substack isn’t alone in being linguistically confusing. Certainly, the terminology splatter of online communication has gotten especially absurd in the past year. Meta, for example, introduced Threads, which despite its name seems largely populated with single posts — and, in fact, isn’t particularly adept at threads, at least compared to Mastodon. As for Mastodon, its own app uses the term “reblogged” when you “boosted” or otherwise “shared” someone else’s post, meaning they’re employing the sort of language from back when what came to be called social media was still called “microblogging.”
Substack’s original introduction of Notes referred repeatedly to the “attention economy” (more like the distraction economy), which it criticizes. Their description of Notes comes across a bit like a car manufacturer noting, in appropriately solemn tones, its concerns about driving under the influence of alcohol — and then explaining that the cup holder was designed to keep bottles cool. Actually, that’s not a fair comparison, because Substack never even makes a clear case that Notes are anything other than another way to earn the attention of one’s readers. How many people publish — not merely write, but publish — without the desire to attract and retain a reader’s attention. Certainly the so-called attention economy has its demerits, but the idea that Notes is apart from it doesn’t seem to hold water.
So, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to add Notes to my social media activity. I already post to Mastodon, and (often in a shorter version determined by their respective constraints) to Bluesky and Threads, and less frequently to Facebook, which I use mostly to communicate with friends and family who don’t really care about (or, frankly, for) my interest in sound. I’m pretty active online, but I’m not “always online” let alone “extremely online.” I don’t do social media between dinner and breakfast. I take weekends off. And I try to use my tools intentionally and selectively.
