About Substack
Where I complain that the food is terrible and the portions are so small
The first months of this year haven’t permitted me space for writing. Now I have so much to say that I’m overwhelmed at the prospect. For the reader’s sake and mine, I’ll take it slowly.
I continue to have strong resistance to Substack as a platform. Since Substack introduced Notes and started positioning itself as a social media platform like Twitter, the bots and trolls have found us. I’m muting and blocking more than I’ve ever needed to. Substack is also attracting more real people who have no interest in writing or dialogue but just want to stir things up.
Because Substack has a central platform and is doing more to attract readers to that platform rather than just receiving newsletters to their inboxes, and because of the Notes feature, there has been a kind of leveling effect between newsletters. Excellent reporting by real journalists, and writing by good writers (professional and not) has the same valence as, well, utter crap. I suppose blogs, back in the day, had a similar problem, but because each blog appeared as an independent site and there was no centralized platform, they didn’t as easily give the appearance of parity between quality and crap, truth and lies. It was also much easier to ignore the weak and poor-quality blogs, because they weren’t popping up in an endless feed via algorithm.
Further, the use of AI to generate and edit content (because it ain’t writing) is, to me, repulsive. Those who use it may not realize how very, very clear their use is to people who know how to spot it. I read a post yesterday that careened between a naive thinking and writing style (which at least had the virtue of being genuine) and bland but sophisticated sentences in the tell-tale cadence of AI writing. It was as if the writer had let AI do the work when the concepts became too difficult for them to articulate.
People who use Substack primarily to build their brand and get their work (coaching or therapy, say) in front of many eyes, and who are churning out posts at a rapid pace, may be using AI to do the lion’s share of their writing; I’ve seen several examples of this. And I block, block, block. If you’re going to do this, at least be transparent about it. (I listen to a short weekly podcast where the host says in the notes for every episode that it was co-created with AI. I listen to get the information, which I know is reliable because it’s in one of my areas of expertise.)
I stay on Substack because this is where the readers are, and because this newsletter is foremost an act of solidarity, which becomes less effective if few people read it. Here, people find my writing. At the same time, my ambivalence about the platform certainly affects the frequency of my writing here.
Coming soon (like, starting as soon as I hit “publish” on this): A series of posts about the increasing exclusion of Jewish people from public spaces, professional networks, social-justice workshops, protests, classrooms, and other places where people gather.