Substack Has a Discovery Problem

What good Is 75,000 publications if no one can find them?

Media is now on Substack. That’s what the advertisements that recently popped up in DC’s Union Station claim. Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie have posted similar messages on Notes. They say Substack is the future of media.

It could be true. It should be. I want it to be true. However, if Substack wants to reach its mighty ambition, this platform must evolve.

Substack’s promise isn’t to become America’s largest blogging platform. It’s more than social media or a newsletter delivery service. It certainly shouldn’t be copying Twitter or trying to become TikTok for intellectuals. Substack’s opportunity lies in becoming the beacon that fills the darkened space that twentieth-century publishers, television networks, radio stations, and magazines left behind. Substack should be a limitless magazine with an endless supply of interesting, surprising, brilliant, poignant, stirring, energizing, and wonderful things for the world to discover and read. It should be a cultural nexus. It should be the connective tissue linking people to stories and ideas. Instead of a platform to monetize old media’s fading stars, it should be the forge that mints new ones and introduces them to the world.

If Substack wants to reinvent media as it claims, it must reorganize itself to help readers discover extraordinary things.

What About the Readers?

I came to Substack not because I wanted to write here, but to read.

I’ve been writing at Substack for about nine months, and it’s a great platform for writers like me. The writing interface is clean. The subscription system is easy. There’s a great community of brilliant writers here with interesting voices and important things to say. As a place to launch a publication, it’s far from perfect but best in class. What matters though isn’t the perspective of writers like me who supply Substack with their voices, sentences, and ideas. What matters is how Substack fits into our culture, society, and world, meaning what it is to readers.

Why should anyone without sentences to sell spend time at Substack? Why should they spend money? If Substack is going to succeed at overtaking media, what matters isn’t technology, monetization, or the interests of writers, but the audiences we want to reach. Right now, the reader experience is honestly a mess.

Substack supposedly hosts over 75,000 publications. Good luck finding them. They’re difficult to search. There are no collections. There are few leaderboards or lists. There are no links from one thing to the next. When you come to Substack, it doesn’t feel like arriving at a media company, a newsstand, a forum, a literary journal, a newspaper, or a nexus of ideas. If I come to read interesting takes on politics, how do I find them? If I want to learn about new discoveries from people in their fields, how do I do that, too? If I want to read short stories or poems or serialized novels, how am I meant to discover the ones I might enjoy?

When someone comes to Substack, there’s no slick landing page promoting interesting new things to read. There’s no recommendation engine. There’s no vehicle for promoting new voices. There isn’t even a useful directory. The only tool to find anything fresh on Substack is Notes. Unfortunately, that’s now degrading as a vehicle for discovery too.

A year ago, Notes was marginally useful for finding interesting pieces and new writers. The advice for anyone starting a Substack was to engage heavily with Notes. Back then, people still mainly used Notes to promote their writing, along with the writing of others that they liked. People still use it like that sometimes, but not as much. As new people joined, most of them used Notes for X-style microblogging. Notes is no longer an engine for discovering things on Substack but a slightly more upscale X or Bluesky. When Substack first launched Notes, the Notes were shared widely with people you didn’t know. These days, the Notes algorithm is noticeably more incestuous, largely circulating Notes in tightly-bounded clusters with people who already read one another instead of reaching new readers. That’s fine for social media, but not for finding readers.

If someone doesn’t already read you, good luck with them finding you through Notes.

This might be okay if there was some other place to share and discover Substack content off platform, but there isn’t. Other services, desiring to keep traffic to themselves, hate Substack and punish Substack outlinks. Putting a Substack link anywhere other than Substack is basically asking that post to vanish.

How can Substack become a limitless vortex of interesting new things if no one can find anything on it other than the things they already know and read? How can Substack nourish minds if the only voices it promotes are top sellers, meaning people who are already popular and known? If you do luck into finding something, how are you meant to easily find the next thing? In this world of hundreds of thousands of hidden articles and stories, where is Alice’s rabbit hole into which you fall to discover exciting things? Other creative platforms are far from perfect, but at least they try. YouTube doesn’t just serve videos from people you already know. It uses topic browsing, recommendation systems, and human curation. Spotify promotes new artists through playlists and algorithms. Netflix is scrollable and makes recommendations. Writing involves more variety and creativity than any other human activity or art, but Substack does none of these.

The reasons for this seemingly baffling design decision is hardly a mystery. Substack’s current focus is bringing people with large existing audiences to the platform. The reason for that is no mystery either. If someone already has hundreds of thousands of people following them, that’s hundreds of thousands of new subscriptions up for grabs. I get it. In the short term, it’s smart. Over the long-term, it’s disaster.

People with large existing audience built them in the media world that’s dying. They’re mainly former staff of publications that once had huge audiences, TV personalities back when TV mattered, or the first-wave of early 2000s bloggers who got famous as pioneers and then picked up legacy media jobs. It’s questionable whether these are even the right backgrounds for Substack. Legacy media spent years beating out the voices and ideas of its stars with terse house stylebooks created when ink had costs. TV is a place in which saying nothing in a soundbite is an art. Building a following on snarky, cliquey, and cruel echo chambers like X is hardly useful to creating compelling essays. Even if they were, there’s a limited supply of old world stars and we’re not making any more. The pipelines that created them are gone.

If Substack is the future of media, it needs to invest in media’s future. Why isn’t Substack focused on where the opportunity is, creating its own new stars?

Substack has so many amazing writers. Their work has voice and style. They’re interesting. They’re insightful. Many have interesting backgrounds and experiences giving their words weight. They don’t write in that clipped house style of the twentieth century, where voice was flattened and risk edited out. They have something interesting to say. The people I read here aren’t just as good as anyone from traditional media. They’re better. Reading them feels like returning to the days when Scott Fitzgerald was publishing dispatches in the Saturday Evening Post, or Hemingway in Colliers, or Hunter Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag were getting paid to publish brilliant essays in places like Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. What’s better is these writers are part of a community. When they publish something great, I can expand on it and share it. When I do something great, they do the same. Substack is a network of fresh writers, thinkers, activists, storytellers, and stylists offering their words in conversation, and readers get the benefit.

The problem is these thousands of writers with scorching talent, but no household name, are fighting against the Substack system instead of flourishing with it. This is a community churning out so much brilliant work no one can find, and instead of helping them, management doesn’t even see the problem. Everyone who writes here has this conversation constantly. It’s why people get angry at new features that don’t promote writing. It’s why people get mad instead of thrilled when big names come onboard. It’s why people obsess over metrics. It’s why too many of the best performing pieces here are snake-oil promising the Substack middle class with hacks for growth.

I think it’s great that Paul Krugman is now on Substack. It gives the platform legitimacy. It brings in readers. Does anyone believe, however, if Krugman showed up on Substack still a mere economics professor, he would have the same success? His content would be just as good. The audience would still be there. They just would never know they wanted to read him. The reason Krugman can quickly build a large audience on Substack is because for years The New York Times put him in front of its large audience, allowing readers to learn they liked him. Why isn’t Substack doing the same for all the impressive professors, public policy wonks, novelists, autodidacts, experts, activists, and muse-touched daydreamers already here?

Forget about us writers. What about the readers? How are they supposed to find brilliant things to read? How are they supposed to fall down a rabbit hole of curious discovery? Where is our twenty-first-century endless issue of McClures, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, The New Republic, Time, Esquire, and Rolling Stone?

Substack Economics

I’ve often heard it said the economics of Substack can’t support a middle class of emerging writers. That’s bunk.

The commonly accepted figure is Americans now spend between 6 and 7 hours per day connected to their screens. They spend 2 to 3 hours on social media. Not all of this is reading articles; a lot is tweets, TikToks, DMs, YouTube, podcasts, and Instagram. However, people across the world are spending hours and hours each day reading, clicking, and scrolling through ideas and information. That means there’s an insatiable demand for ideas, stories, conversation, and distractions for anyone prepared to offer something compelling.

What an incredible opportunity.

They say people will never pay for more than a few Substack subscriptions. Those five dollars quickly start adding up. They say this means Substack will never be more than a vehicle for a handful of stars, supported by the dreams of tens of thousands of naïve hobbyists scribbling away thinking they’re writers when actually they’re the market. Hogwash. In the 1990s before the Internet, magazines were over a $10 billion industry, with publications routinely paying $1 to $3 per word to top writers. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over $20 billion. There was so much money in writing articles that top writers received colossal expense accounts, while Tom Wolfe earned over $80,000 in 1989 dollars to deliver a single 7000-word piece. People will pay to read things. They’re already paying to read things on Substack. You just need to create something worthwhile. The reason people have a small budget for reading at the moment is the same reason they stopped paying for music and television in the early 2000s. The market was broken and the distribution model was junk. As soon as someone fixed the market, they started to pay again.

The market for Substack is bigger than you realize, and there’s more than enough to share. Give people something worth reading and package it in a way that’s compelling, and they will come. This is the start of a golden age for the written word, and we’re just waiting for someone to pick up all the gold coins scattered on the ground. The key to unlocking all this treasure is in discovery, and in minting and elevating a new generation of stars.

For readers, Substack should feel like a literary and journalistic wonderland of stories, ideas, and style. It should put a vibrant array of interesting articles from new voices at your fingertips. It should help you easily find things that interest you. When you find a piece you like, it should help you discover similar pieces from other writers. If you want to find something on a topic, it should be searchable and findable. If you want to delve into a style, it should shower you with options. Instead of promoting top sellers, how about fresh talent? Coming to Substack should feel like walking into a candy store for words.

Substack should link pieces and writers in conversations. It should help you easily find other pieces from the same writer without having to tediously scroll the back catalogue. It should offer collections of interesting essays on a theme. It should hold events like forums and literary festivals. Instead of invisible algorithms or AIs looking to increase the empty metric of engagement, it should empower humans to increase wonder and discovery. Instead of wading through snarky X-style notes, Substack readers should find a vast array of interesting pieces and new voices. Instead of trading social media posts, readers should become part of communities built around stories and ideas. When a reader comes to Substack, they should fall down a wondrous rabbit hole into discovering marvelous things.

I’m not saying this only because it’s what I want. It’s where the market hole exists, and therefore the market opportunity. It’s also what we need. Culture right now is rotten. We’re angry, divided, and addled as a people. We shout and repeat empty slogans. We elevate junk and noise. We care too little about ideas or truth. There’s far too little wonder. There aren’t enough rainbows or symphonies. There’s too little curiosity and joy. Our culture is stagnant and we’re in a creative drought. Our world has too little color and too much gray. There’s hunger to return to a more vibrant world in which curiosity and wonder reign. There’s a market to satisfy that hunger.

I’m confident it’s only a matter of time until someone figures out how to do it, and whoever does it first will own the market for writing, creativity, stories, and ideas. I hope it will be Substack.

What do you think about the lack of discovery on Substack. Join the conversation in the comments.