Against Substack and Closed Ecosystems
December 2025 (308 Words, 2 Minutes)
In the year 1263 (give or take a historian yelling at me in the comments), there was a manor called Saint Algorithm.
The lord of Saint Algorithm—Lord Stack of Sub—announced with fanfare: any serf with a talent for words could claim a small plot near the village square and read their writings aloud each week. In return, the peasant would give the manor a modest tithe: ten shillings per hundred, plus the usual “don’t commit heresy on the premises” clause.
This was a big deal, because most peasants with a talent for words were previously stuck doing the traditional medieval content strategy: Not writing anything and doing backbreaking manual labor instead.
But Saint Algorithm had distribution.
When you use someone else’s platform, you are renting space on their land. At first, the rent is cheap. Sometimes it’s free. The landlord is nice. They provide everything you need. No startup cost! Free hosting! Free custom domain name! Recommendation graph to help readers discover you!
The landlord knows when enough people move in, they can’t leave. The power of a social graph is that each individual person is trapped by where their connections are. Your audience lives inside their walled garden, and you can’t take them with you. The switching costs are too high.
The landlord has all the power. Substack might let you export your posts and your subscribers now, but they could turn off that feature at any time. Everything they offer you as a “perk”, they also control - they could de-rank you or take down your site. Think back to a time before Twitter (“X”…) demoted tweets with out-links and shadow-banned individual accounts that wronged Elon Musk.
Closed ecosystems are flywheels. Why do people use Substack instead of Patreon? Patreon provides the same monetization model, but without the closed ecosystem. The ethos of Patreon is to support creators who create elsewhere. Creators build their audience and create their material on YouTube or podcasts or whatever; Patreon is just a “link in description.” Since the audience isn’t centralized on Patreon, Patreon is weak at getting creators discovered, which decreases the incentive for creators to join Patreon.
Why do people join closed ecosystems? For creators, it’s obviously convenience. Writers aren’t going to learn how to configure DNS records and Stripe webhooks. What about readers? Substack did a brilliant play by paying big creators like Slate Star Codex to write on their platform. Fans of SSC (yours truly included) of course created accounts to support him. Then the recommendation feed helped us discover other bloggers on Substack… pretty soon every morning became “coffee and Substack”.
At some point Substack can start taking a bigger cut and optimizing its algorithm for engagement vs quality. It might market this as “sustainability.” Later it becomes “industry standard.”
Owning your own site requires a lot of work, but it’s the only way to truly own what you make. Don’t be a Substack serf!