Is Substack Doomed?

Not necessarily, but probably.

Substack was a great idea, but it is collapsing under its own weight faster than a Jenga tower. I currently have over 23,000 emails from Substack in my inbox. The odds of me going back and reading any of the posts they contain is not zero, but it’s close to zero.

I’ve been on Substack since 2023, and in that time I’ve subscribed to quite a few writers. I don’t know how many, because Substack shows you a list of your subscriptions but doesn’t give you a numerical count. But it’s a lot, and they are all writers who are writing things I’d be interested in reading.

But I’m not reading any of it. Because the tidal wave of emails is completely overwhelming. It’s not spam; it’s good stuff. It’s just too much.

Substack’s subscription fatigue mirrors the cautionary tale of Google Reader

Ignoring the Obvious Solution

In the mid-2000s, Google Reader faced an identical issue. Users would sign up for blogs and receive an email with each new post. Just like Substack, the “unread” count would climb, users would get frustrated, and eventually Google shut down the service.

But the solution to this is not rocket science. For at least the last year, numerous Substack users have raised the suggestion of automated “digest” emails. Instead of receiving a separate email with each post you’ve subscribed to, you would receive a weekly email with the titles and first few words of each of them, and you could scroll through it like a normal e-newsletter and choose which ones to read.

This is not a revolutionary concept. In fact, it’s the way e-newsletters have been done by virtually every company and publication for decades. Medium.com, the platform that most closely resembles Substack, does exactly this.

But, Substack does not offer this option. Instead, each reader receives a separate email from each writer.

Just like Google Reader, if you only subscribe to a handful of writers, this is fine. But the more active and engaged you are with the platform, the more you are punished with an unmanageable volume of emails.

Notes is a Nope

Does anyone know why Substack thought it needed a Twitter clone? As far as I can tell, Notes functions exactly like Twitter: it’s a popularity contest in which messages from the most prominent/provocative users get blasted to everyone, while everybody else’s notes disappear into the electronic void like snowflakes in a blizzard.

To add insult to injury, Notes seems to particularly emphasize messages from writers cheerfully marveling how quickly they’ve grown their subscriber lists from zero to thousands. As someone who has been diligently posting thoughtful content for years and has yet to break 300 subscribers, I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t rankle a bit.

What’s the Plan?

The biggest red flag I see with Substack is the absence of any clear vision for the future. If you have a platform that simply sends its users an ever-increasing number of emails, how can that possibly work in the long-term?

The people running Substack need to take a hard look at the choices they’re making, and acknowledge the rapidly deteriorating user experience. If they don’t, the platform is going to find itself crushed under a mountain of unread emails.