Dan Kennedy, a professor who writes often about the business of news and journalism:
Substack isn’t merely similar to blogging. It is blogging, and it’s amazing that so many think that it’s new and different. Like Blogspot, WordPress, Medium (an earlier cautionary tale for journalists) and others, Substack will take its place as just another platform for self-publishing — better than some, but evolutionary, not revolutionary.
– Blogging is dead. Long live blogging, Dec 2020
The big difference between Substack on the one hand and software and blogging services on the other is that a newsletter lands up in your mailbox, like newspapers and magazines of old.
Things would have been different if RSS had taken off, but here we are. Email apps no longer support RSS; browsers don’t detect and highlight RSS feeds on web pages; Google Reader has been dead nearly a decade.
Dan’s core point stands: anyone can publish, but a rare few will reach a subscriber base large enough to support a full time job newsletter writing.
And that is because just like with blogging services before it, Substack too has struggled with discovery of new and interesting writers, as we have discussed on this site last year.
To that end, the Twitter owned newsletter service Revue is better placed for surfacing new, independent writers because people can set up their Revue newsletters show up on their Twitter profile, like so:
Substack has chosen to generate awareness by encouraging writers with a substantial existing following to start a newsletter. It highlights organic breakout successes. But it still doesn’t have anything beyond this, no directory or recommendation engine to bubble up the thousands and thousands of ordinary people who have their own Substack.
Endnote:
As things stand now, there are still too many steps to set this up. Not everyone sees a ’newsletters’ tab in their Twitter app that prompts them to set one up. Then, if you sign up to Revue with your email and a password, you need to link your Twitter account to your Revue one. And everyone needs to dive into settings and set your newsletter show up on your profile.
There’s a lot of room for Twitter to make this a lot simpler.
It could also build Revue into the Twitter app itself: have Twitter threads optionally published as a Revue issue and vice versa. Have Twitter super-followers optionally join the paid version of the writer’s newsletter for an additional fee. And so on.