michael-dean-k/

1. As a writer needs a site of one's own, a place designed for their particular psychology so they can be the most prolific, honest, adventurous version of themselves. Solitude is important. Montaigne, the founder of the essay, wrote up in his tower for a decade. When you are your own audience, your practice is self-justifying. You are intrinsically fulfilled, and do it regardless of validation, growth, or revenue. To become self-validating is to become a nuclear engine of creativity. When you write on your own site, chances are you will spend much time on ideas that no one will read. That's inefficient, but essays are inefficient. I need to ruthlessly follow what matters to me, with no fear of being illegible or invisible to others.
2. That said, you can and should invite others into your garage. I still plan to keep my Substack and post there, but it will be more like a newsletter, a digest of the controlled explosions happening in my own neighborhood. I do believe in the value, even, the responsibility, of writing in public. By making your place tidy enough for friends, strangers, students, customers, mentors, heroes, whoever, to come in, it makes you put an extra oomph in your crafting of language, and it creates seeds from which relationships can grow. When you have visitors in your territory, they play by your own rules, so you're generally safe from mobs and barbarians. They will not trample over your furniture and throw the books from your shelf like they would in the town square.
3. In 2023, I was hopeful that Substack could be an all-in-one platform—a website/newsletter/discovery engine—but it has heavily shifted into an app-centric social media platform. The app starts you off in an endless, algorithmic, engagement-ranked feed, and the design has slowly evolved to trap you in the app. When you click in article, the default URL is the Substack one. When you click into a person, you can't even go to their site anymore; you can only view them through their profile template. This means all the customization and self-archiving and mythologizing that goes into your site is off limits to the app, the thing they're trying to corrall attention through.
4. I'm very allergic to "Substack is dead" posts, and most of the critique is often a projection of their own weaknesses (ie: when people naturally stop growing, it's easy to blame the algorithm than to take responsibility for it). In my case, the Substack algorithm has worked pretty well over the last two years, and I'd be stupid to abandon it. But the whole system has limited my intrinsic passion to write, and that matters more, enough that I'm willing to take the risk with a split publishing system: Substack newsletters that link out to my site.
5. Back in 2020, a Write of Passage concept was the "public to private bridge," meaning you find people in social media feeds, but then redirect them back to a place of your own. Now that Substack is mostly a social media network, I think that same strategy applies. It's not where I want to host my essays anymore. I'll host newsletters and paid content there, but the timeless stuff wants to live in a place that is timeless.
6. If you have a portfolio of writing, Substack feels like a pretty bad way to make your old work legible, especially within the app. There are no tags or sections. No about page. No navigation system. No ability to frame call to actions as visually dominant. The beauty of your website, especially if you build it from local markdown files, is (1) you have a single source of truth for all your writing, and (2) you can just respawn new interface and navigation systems as your portfolio evolves.
7. Even though Substack lets you export your essays, it's really more like a failsafe, a backup incase you ever decide to leave. Of course, it's very nice to have that! But it's still a cloud-based system, where editing your past files is slow and clunky, and you have limited ability to point your essays elsewhere. When I have a local folder of my essays, I can very easily spin up a stylized website around any essay, or any group of essays (say, for example, if I'm making a proposal and I want to curate a handful of essays. I can point my AI at any combination of files and folders for context.

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

Chris Best, founder of Substack, posted that they caught “President Plump,” the #1 growing account on Substack, for using fake subscriptions to boost discovery. I think this was intended to comfort everyone that they caught a scammer (justice!), but actually it confirmed what many were starting to notice: discovery is contingent on you making money. If you have paid subscribers turned off, no algorithmic wind will blow your way. But if you have a spike of paid subscribers in a month, suddenly your old posts will start to go viral, in hopes that even more paid subscribers will bring the platform 10% (this has happened to me before). This isn’t inherently bad. For every President Plump, there is an earnest person trying to finance their creative project.

But at scale I fear it creates a bad pattern, because the accounts that everyone sees will be the ones making the most, and generally these will be marketers and growth hackers more than artists. I think you will find better writing in the gutters of Substack than on their rising leaderboard. If authentic culture emerges outside of monetization, then there’s a real rift between what Substack wants to be (“an engine for culture”) and what it actually is (an algorithm that only rewards monetization).

I think the best we can do is use this information to our advantage. For example, I could have new Essay Club members pay directly through Stripe, but by handling payments through my Founding Members tier on Substack, I get a discovery boost, which is worth the 10% fee. Similarly, if you make small digital products, it might make sense to bundle them into a subscription instead of charging per item.

Should you use a credit card masking service to give yourself 20 paid subscriptions for $5 each? Depends. Basically, for $10/month, you can pay for a probably noticeable increase in discovery. The question is, will you get caught? Maybe they are on the lookout now, but my guess is they would only penalize it at a certain scale. Sam Kriss speculated that President Plump was paying himself around $5,000 per month to reach #1. I’ve never done this, and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it unless you have a hacker mentality and really need the growth. 

At the very least, you should consider having paid subscriptions turned on. Cate Hall found success in charging $1/month and getting to #1 rising. Our very own Yehudis Milchtein also set up $1/month subscriptions and is now #91 rising in literature.

However you approach this, it brings up a bigger question for me on how to build a real engine for culture. It seems like you can’t have an algorithm for a single reward (popularity or money) or else they will be gamed; instead you could give everyone curatorial power relative to their cultural reputation, however you measure that. For example, if we all trust Ted Gioia, then somehow Ted’s like should count more than 10,000 bot likes or $1,000 in fake subscriptions.

I hope this triggers more transparency from Substack on how their algorithm works, and also hope for a new generation of platforms where each person has visibility into and control of the thing that is routing them information.

One of the thrills of the AI revolution will be how it untangles software from bad incentives. Today, software is expensive to build and maintain, and so it needs returns to fund itself. The big social media companies have annual expenses of $50m-$50b; they are in no position to operate from virtues, or to deliver on their stated aspirations of “connecting the world,” because they need to optimize for attention and convert it to revenue to fund the ridiculous scale of the operation.

But now we’ve hit the point where autonomous coding is real: Claude’s Opus 4.5 can code for many hours straight. I am currently “rebuilding Circle,” the community platform, except not as a platform, but as a single customized instance for my community (Essay Club). I am maybe 4 hours in and half way done. Circle wanted $1k/year, so I built my own with a $20/mo subscription.

When you can just prompt software into existence, you don’t need fundraising, an expanding team, and all the sacrifices that come with capital. Software can start reflecting the will of visionaries, rather than the exploited psyches of the masses. Of course, AI coding will also enable huckster bot swarms to sell Candy Crush clones and other brain rot variants, but more importantly I think we’re entering a new era of techno-activism.

Millions will use their weekends to spin up apps, sites, tools, platforms, and networks, not for the sake of colonizing the planet’s attention, but for the sake of gift-giving or mischief-making or culture-shaping. It could mean that we shift our attention from hyper-commoditized feeds to mission-driven places.

Today, I think a single person could spin up a million-person writing-based network for under $100k/year (my guess is that’s <0.2% of Substack’s cost). If you clone something exactly (like Twitter>Bluesky), there’s little reason to switch because you lose the network effects. But the oozification of code & interface means that we can start experimenting with better social architectures. How might a network built for human flourishing actually function? A novel concept paired with a small critical mass (just a few hundred people) might be enough to trigger a cascade of platform switching.

The irony is that AI coding is only possible because big companies have been able to amass extreme amounts of capital, resources, and data, but in doing so they’ve released something that could erode their own monopolies on attention, the last scarce resource. Now I think it comes down to what people decide to build. If everyone can build anything, will we each try to build our own empire of extraction, or will we contribute to a culture we want to live in ourselves?

I didn’t realize that Substack is open about paying off-platform creators to join their platform. See their $20m accelerator fund. My quick understanding is that, if you make $X revenue/year elsewhere, they guarantee you’ll make that, and will make up the difference if after a year, you don’t. A friend thinks there’s an additional secret fund that pays bonuses for celebrities to join (ie: Dolly Parton, Charlie XCX). I was surprised by how articulate Charlie XCX was—I only have a meme-level understanding of her—but I suppose it’s possibly ghostwritten. Idk.

I don’t have problems with this, but what doesn’t register to me is why they wouldn’t allocate money to help the on-platform, original writers. Obviously, these kinds of things piss of 95% of their userbase. Even if there was something like $100-$1m for on-platform writers with audiences under 1,000, that would build a tremendous amount of goodwill. My guess (and fear) is that they have a business model blindness, and aren’t thinking along the planes of “what actually builds organic culture?” Instead, there’s a lot of rationalizing: “here’s why bringing Derek Thompson on platform is good for you” (but the obvious benefit comes from the 10% they get from DT).

It’s weird to me that in some sense I’m giving more to it’s existing writers ($10,000), than the platform that raised $100,000,000.

Even if a SM feed is filled with all of your favorite ideas, friends, and thinkers, it would still be poison from the sheer volume of randomness. Even the act of seeing two things in feed, forces you to shift from one context to another, forcing you to shift frames, destabilizing and disembodying you.

Alternatively, if you had a feed of a hundred things, but they all revolve around the same content, all spawned from a singular intention, I think it would be less dizzying; it’s more enables depth into your present, embodied frame. There is less of a “slot machine” effect. 

It’s not that feeds or algorithms are bad; they only became bad when they strip context. The logic of most feeds, however, do not care if you feel oriented. They have a simple reward function, show you as many different things as they can, to see which ones drive behavior. They are running a real-time self-adaptive experiment on your preferences, in the hope to discover which patterns might nudge you into their desired behavior (whether it’s towards an ad or towards an on-platform paid subscription by a beloved writer, they are effectively the same—it’s an algorithm that is not being real with you, and not respecting your attention).

I feel like a broken record in prescribing a solution, but it’s basically Plexus (RIP): show nothing until you post, and then from what you post, share a feed of semantically related posts. Substack, as a writing network, is a unique position to build this. It has a lot of long form content: not just notes, but essays, podcasts, and videos. It should be looking at the granular units, semantically embedding paragraphs, and then those become atomic objects that help populate the “semantic feed” generated after every Note.

So Alex Dobrenko started a new personal website (I will not link to it because it’s secret), but he sent it to me, so I spent some time on it and wrote him some notes, and then he wrote a reply post to me, and now I’m making a reply log to that (and upon re-reading, I realize it’s now a whole essay). It’s something like a semi-public letter exchange. 

Letters, emails, same thing. 

Similar to how the 20th century has books like “Virginia Woolf: The Letters,” I wonder if the 21st century will have “Alex Dobrenko: The Emails,” where his children posthumously assemble and publish all their dad’s best emails. ((Also, now that my cholesterol is borderline, and my daughter is on the way, I’m having new thoughts about preparing for my death, like “THIS IS DAD FROM THE PAST AND HERE ARE ALL THE PASSWORDS.”) Something about losing all my writing forever feels worse than dying. We eventually have to die, but you only lose your writing forever if you’re careless and lazy. Rant over.)

What I like about letters/emails over essays is that there isn’t a mass-market context, and so you’re writing for just one person. That’s good essay advice too (“write for one person”—we literally taught this in Write of Passage), but deep down, it’s hard to forget that you’re writing for all people of all times, especially if you are.

Recently I mentioned that I’ve spent 2 years nerding out on essay patterns (the objective stuff on the page), but I want to start thinking more about the process: how do I show up to write?

One idea is to start essays as letters to specific people. Eventually, that can evolve into something for the main list, but I don’t want to start with them in mind. I want to start with a specific problem in my life, and then, with a small group of people who relate to that problem. Any idea I have comes with a clear person in mind, someone who would probably be most excited to read it, and has all the context needed so I can avoid the bush beating.

If I want to write about Alternate Internet Communities and weird websites, I’ll write to Alex. If I want to write about the insanity of the Dark Enlightenment, I’ll write to Andrew. Theology to Taylor, Emerson to Will, Hope to Isabel, Fatherhood to Dan, Greeks to Chris, Dreams to Garrett, AGI to Davey, Architecture to Liz, etc. It’s also special to say, “I wrote this for you, and we should talk and get to the bottom of this,” and that could really change the nature of the essay because someone else is co-shaping it with you.

Alex brings up a good question: why doesn’t Substack feel like this? I have to think more on this, but I think the stage effect is still at play. If you have a 10k audience, it still feels like a megaphone, and when you’re on Notes, you participate in American Idol, again with new skin. It’s still the best town in town, and there are tricks (ie: set up an opt-in Section for experiments so you can have a “shadow audience” that’s 1% the size of your main one), but there’s friction in tricks like that. It’s not the main way the platform is intended to be used. It’s meant for loud, marketing-style updates, that confidently funnel readers into a paid subscription tier (I got 15 paid subs from my last one, and so I realize the value in learning to play that game, but it’s just that, a game, yet a game that determines my financial security, but it’s not the full “culture” in “culture engine” that Substack can possibly build; it’s a reward function that could make this place like LinkedIn in <3 years).

So, how do you build a “culture engine,” for real? What is it beyond a tagline or positioning? To start, I think it goes beyond revenue. Of course, Substack needs to pay bills (separate point, but once we reach the vibe code singularity, the bills might be so low that SM networks won’t have to ruthlessly optimize). I think Substack could 1) diversify their business model, so that they don’t have a single attractor that incentives every thought to be monetized, and 2) make decisions from a cultural perspective—even if there’s no explicit revenue tie-in, by creating a good culture, you retain the people and prevent a Writer’s Exodus.

But to get even more specific, a “culture engine,” sounds like the kind of place that would trigger long letters back and forth between writers, kind of like this. I used to see some of that happening, but it seemed like a performance too: “And now, here is email 6 of 7 about how to start a public email debate” or something. The core difference is that, when there’s two people writing back and forth, there’s permission to perform less and less until you’re eventually just very real with each other. This is what I love about Neal Cassady’s letters to Jack Kerouac (troubled guys, who are a topic for another time). 

Why aren’t Substack comments like this? For one, they’re truncated. But two, I don’t know, sometimes comments even feel performative too? I feel it, on both the giving and receiving end. After I post, it feels like a chore to respond, even though I often love what people write and want to respond. I think it’s because, since it’s in public, and everyone can read, it feels like an obligation to respond. I wish there was an option to have “private comments,” and even “private replies to comments.” Like, other readers could see, “Michael Dean replied to this, privately” so they know I’m not a dick.

Okay, last thing, maybe: I think the real problem is that the discovery mechanics are all wrong. Like, I don’t want to blast this letter to everyone I know. But yet also, I don’t mind if everyone I know happens to stumble across it. There is a huge difference. I’ll put this in my logs, but realistically, no one is going to find it. I guess I could put it on Notes? But that feels too vulnerable too. Ideally, the right people will find it as they write about similar issues. So if some Substacker is also writing about private comments, to themselves, or to a friend, they will suddenly find a thread between Alex and Michael talking about a similar thing, and then suddenly we all have visibility into each other’s notes, letters, essays about those things. Forks merged.

The social media network I want to park in (or plug my personal website into) is one where everything is semi-public, but you only discover things through your own writing. I don’t know the right metaphor: it’s like each notes or essay is a flashlight that you use to move around this massive information cavern and you make friends along the way. It has nothing to do with engagement or revenue, but semantic similarity. This feels closer to the original vision of the Internet, to connect people based on ideas.

Sublime has some features that are adjacent to this, and Plexus was very close to this too, but I do think there’s something to owning your place. Is there some protocol where you can fuse the autonomy of your website with the connectivity of a network? I feel like AI is going to simultaneously bring us to (a) slop town, and (b) a golden age in social media experimentation; as sloptown gets neck high, people will want to move.

PS1: To clarify: I love having an audience, I just don’t love the way my writing is distributed to them, and also don’t love the way conversation is facilitated. Comments are okay, but the Chat feature feels pretty off. I wish I could write 30 essays per month, like this, and each one would get the 3 that are most relevant.

PS2: It took Alex 9 days to reply to my original notes, which is still ~2x faster than the letter cadence back in the day. That’s fast! I wonder if AIM culture poisoned letter culture. I haven’t responded to my Substack comments from 5 days ago, and I feel bad.

Just heard Hamish (on a livestream) say that Substack is a revolution, a “found economy,” that materialized 5 million paid subscriptions that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. What is a revolution though? I think I want to zoom into this positioning, because many words are being used interchangeably. Yes, it’s a new business model for monetization, but is that a “cultural revolution”?

It feels like there’s a bit of a fixation on the 10% mechanism, and the risk is that this reward function turns Substack into LinkedIn in the next 3 years. If the goal is to make a “culture engine,” you need to really ask what a culture is. If you’re culture is limited to paid subscriptions, it’s a small, unrepresentative, utilitarian culture, much more slanted to journalism and business tactics, regardless of an editorial attempt to bring a flair of literature.

We need to define culture (in terms of taste, values, and quality), and then make platform design decisions that have nothing to do with revenue. Of course, I’m not saying to abandon revenue focus; I’m saying that they need to allocate some percent of their attention to “doing weird things” to prevent a writer exodus as enshittifcation strengthens.

Thought experiment: how could a social network be designed so that 100% of users create? Obviously it would be hard and limited in scale, but this is the metric to take seriously if we want a corner of the Internet to exist outside the television attractor.

Basic example: you open an app and there’s no feed. You have to post something first. Then, and only then, does it unlock a feed of things related to your post. So it’s not a popularity feed, but a semantic feed. It feels a lot less like American Idol (the stage, the voting, the ads, etc.).

Maybe it’s not feasible to build something like this today: if you’re building/maintaining a million/billion person network, the costs are real enough that you have no other option but to turn into reality TV and fund it all through commercials.

But, if the cost of software goes down significantly in the next 10 years (because AI), we could see smaller, less mercenary, more experimental networks, networks that diverge in form from the endless feed. Of course, AI will also make the mega/mono-TV unimaginably addicting, but that might spook people into seeking alternatives, to find places that ask “how do we connect in a place that is not reality TV?”

So instead of MAU (monthly active users), how could you maximize PMAP (percent of monthly active posters)?

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

"Freedom of speech" is not enough. The freedom to say what you want is irrelevant if no one can discover what you’re saying. It’s an illusion of freedom. What matters is:

1. Algorithmic transparency: the ability to see, audit, control the systems to route you information.
2. Interpetability of perspectives: the ability to see the multiple ways to interpret an event, not just a single propagandic angle.
3. Consensus building: the ability for people to weigh in, analyze a discussion, and agree on if something is valuable or not, thus re-weighting the credibility of those involved in the discussion.

Fixing these three things could radically reduce addiction, polatiry, and fatigue on the Internet.

I recalibrated my social media blocker (Cold Turkey), so that I need to write 250 characters of gibberish (takes 5 minutes), and if I get one character wrong, it resets the whole string (with moderate focus, I still get ~5 characters wrong). This creates a passable, but significant block. I had a more lenient block before, where I only had to rewrite 5 random works, which I could do in <5-10 seconds. Now, the friction is real. My friend called it “torture.” Is it really worth focusing for 5 minutes on non-sense to unlock a feed I know that will distract me?

App idea: a browser extension that locks any feed (Notes, X, etc.) until you write X words. Points: (1) There would be no option to skip, you have to write before you can enter your typical infinite scroll mode; (2) you get to set the word count (ie: 50-500 words); (3) there can be prompts so you don’t have a blank canvas each time; (4) it saves all your writings, either for future sharing, or to build an internal knowledge graph for AI context.

Feels like this could be “algorithmic Aikido” (a martial arts term for redirecting violence). It hijacks a consumption addiction and turns it into creation. 

I’m fascinated by this idea because it could be a way to bootstrap a healthy social network by helping them get unhooked off the bad ones. Everyone, even the most discipline people, know how addicted they can get. If creation discharges the need to binge, then this could save something like 30 hours per month (a modest calc of 1 hour saved per day); and if you value your time at $100/hour, that’s $3k in monthly value for only $9/month. That’s a non-advertising business model. 

Put simply, it’s a fusion of a “browser blocker” and a “note-taking app” that exists at the OS/browser level. It is adaptable enough to layer on top of any, all, future social networks. 

It follows a strong virtue: you have to write before you do anything. After you write, you have 3 options: (1) continue to your feed, guilty; (2) copy your text, so you can post it, or (3) open a finite feed of [13] related posts, ones from our network that are semantically related to your own.

#5 in science recently went viral for sharing that #2 in technology plagiarized her a year ago (right after #2 just went 10k-like viral, again). Substack is freaking. Plagiarism is obviously bad, and I think everyone is shocked to learn that #2 got away with blatant copy-paste work, but I want to focus on the nature of what was plagiarized along with why platforms reward cheap writing.

If someone else can put their name on your writing and almost get away with it, it means you haven’t written something only can you write. The plagiarized post was digital cultural journalism: mostly facts and studies, with only a few “I” mentions that are too vague to be anchored to any specific writer. Obviously it hurts to see your hard work get celebrated under someone else’s name—I’d be pissed too— but research is becoming hyper-commoditized. You have to assume it will be coincidentally/accidentally/purposefully refactored by hucksters, bots parrots, friends, and rivals. If #5 had integrated her research with singular, relevant moments of her life, it would be hard—if not impossible—to rip off. Personal experience is the last moat.

This situation feels like a predictable consequence of engagement-based competition. Among us are people willing to sacrifice craft for clout, at various tiers of insanity. I’ve been noticing high-volume accounts in the Top 10 with obviously AI-generated notes and essays. I wonder who actually reads/likes this stuff, until I look in the comments and realize it’s, likely, all bots. Is Substack status that easily hackable? I guess this is a growth hack that brings you an algorithmic edge in getting discovered by humans, so you can eventually replace the slop with your own writing?

As extrinsic games get increasingly weird, the status of winning them will get decreasingly valuable, I think. If #2 is a slopjockey, I don’t care to reach #1 because the whole game is now polluted (I’m actually a fan of leaderboards, but they need to be merit-based and unhackable). I just don’t know if platforms care to systematically fix this, because status-hackers create volume and speed that make a platform look vibrant to an undiscerning eye/investor.

Over enough time, I think misaligned platforms and those who hack them will eventually lose. The internally-driven writers have to put up with a lot of noise and chaos, but since they aren’t anchored in hacks, they’re less likely to have their means of validation suddenly disappear. It’s OK to be a tortoise in hell.

Substack's role is to grant its readers/writers optionality. This is what makes it different from a place like X that tries to own and dominate your attention. I want the ability to:

• Determine which Notes feed is the main one.
• Control the main icons in my app (and turn off Reels).
• Let readers opt-in for sections on subscription.

I wouldn’t even be that mad if they brought in advertising, assuming there is optionality (meaning, 1) it’s not in the Notes feed, 2) writers choose to get paid by putting ads in their own posts, 3) readers can pay a monthly fee to turn off all ads).

It is clear that Substack is making moves that lead to revenue (because they get a cut), and that’s fine, so long as they grant us optionality.

Banning social media accounts (in Australia), by age (16), feels heavy-handed.

A better solution is to (1) verify identity and age, (2) implement a standard where features have categories and ratings, and then (3), spin up a custom version of that social media site based on age. For example, 5-year olds shouldn’t be limited from YouTube, but maybe there are content blackouts, no vertical video shortform feed, no comments, etc. As you age (/mature), the platform blooms in functionality

Email to Davey:

Thanks for sharing this, Davey. It's a nice encapsulation, an important idea, and I'm sure it's time will come.

I think your nuance on why Related Notes on Twitter didn't work is key. It can't be a side feature, it has to be core. Plexus solved the 90-9-1 problem (90% lurkers, 9% sharers, 1% posters). On Plexus, 100% were posters. This happened because the feed was intentionally withheld until you did the vulnerable thing of shaping/sharing your thoughts. And when you did, you were rewarded with a feed of similar thoughts (an act of encouragement / validation).

As Substack is undergoing TikTokification (my friend sent me a video of his Notes feed, which was all vertical video), I wonder, why can't the Plexus concept exist? Technically, it will be easier, each year, to build something like this, and I wonder what other social frictions need to be fixed for something like it to really work.

There's an inherent tension in a "semantic journaling" app. You want a space that both (1) becomes the place where each person captures their consciousness, but also (2) they want some control over who can/can't see it. I think there are a rare few who are okay being linguistically naked (ie: I have all my logs on my website and I don't care if anyone sees them). It definitely isn't the norm (most people don't even think at the edge, let alone write it, let alone share it). And I have my own limits too (for example, last night my wife reconnected with a middle school bully, and there's much I could write about it, but I lean towards not for the slim chance that someone in her group might find it).

There’s a chance that, at scale, semantically linking is just as unnatural as broadcasting (ie: people will get doxxed / revealed because everything is too interconnected). Maybe instead of having a semantic feed auto-generate, it will spawn a card (with an AI-generated title) that both parties have to accept for the logs to be exchanged/visible. The question is how can you capture the complex psychology of control/privacy in a simple interface/architecture that lets the average, guarded person be maximally unhinged, expressive, and idiosyncratic.

Maybe semi-public journaling will, over time, by 2045 (one of my predictions) become way more normalized, but maybe there’s also a tool that accelerates this (similar to how Uber, AirBnB are both tools that normalized culturally deviant things). Michael