I’ve wrestled with this annoying question for more than I care to admit, so I figured it might be a good idea to think out loud.
Substack is extremely popular right now. But there was a time when Medium was the it blogging platform and now, well, Medium is kind of dead. Maybe not dead-dead, but it’s nowhere near the popularity it once was.
Substack makes writing articles and sending them out to an email list very easy. They’ve added some more customization features over time, but it’s still a relatively simple platform that just works out-of-the-box with minimal fuss.
Substack also solves the distribution problem by recommending your articles (newsletters?) to others on the platform, and the Notes community is sort of a less chaotic version of X. So you can build a readership based solely off your Notes.
The whole “protect your data” doesn’t seem like a big issue either because Substack, like most platforms, makes it relatively easy to export your data.
So why not just write on Substack and leave this personal site as a business card of sorts with links to everywhere I put out content?
Two reasons.
Substack has always to my mind been a place for high quality essays. Some of my favorite writers on Substack are brilliant essayists. That, to me, has always felt like the most elevated version of what a writer could do on the platform.
Substack Notes, on the other hand, are basically tweets. They work well when they’re short and when they hit on a specific feeling or zeitgeist that many people feel an affinity to, and you get the feedback in real-time.
But there should be something between a Note and an Essay.
That something is a blog post.
I’ve often pulled back from hitting publish on Substack because I didn’t feel it was worthy of being published or worthy of bothering my subscribers. It was half-baked ideas I wanted to write but didn’t take anywhere more elevated than that.
That’s where blog posts can, and should, live.
We shouldn’t have to worry about burning our email list because we have a few lines to share. Something more than a Note but less than an Essay.
The second reason, which is maybe even more important, is that I personally miss reading people’s blogs.
As social media sites have consolidated so much of the content we consume, finding little dark corners on the Internet where people share their quirks and ideas feels like something that has been lost or taken from us.
And so even if it’s a bit more work, I’ve decided that I will be writing in both locations.
To carve out my own little dark corner of the web.
Because I want to.