The case for slow social.

On Substack, social media, and the hope for a better web.

Social media seems to be a love / hate relationship for most people.

We love connecting with interesting people, ideas, and friends from far and wide.

But the business models these platforms are built on inherently lead to advertising-riddled, algorithmic nightmares.

They don’t start out that way, because task number one is to build a large user base, and that won’t happen if every other scroll is an intrusive ad or content from someone you never intended to see content from.

So the water starts out clear, and muddies over time as platforms begin to capitalize on the user base they’ve built.

It’s why people wax nostalgically about the early days of Twitter. Or Instagram. Or LinkedIn. Or insert any other platform.

These places used to be real communities with real connections being made every single day. Until they weren’t. The capital machine takes over and before long our attention is used as a rate card for advertisers.

And we, the users, are left mindlessly scrolling to pass the time, because…that’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s what they want us to do. That’s how they make money. And they’re quite good at keeping us in the endless scroll. Much as we think our willpower alone is to blame, there are multi-billion dollar corporations ensuring that’s not the case.

Which brings us to incentives.

And Substack.

Though this post isn’t necessarily about Substack. It’s about the underlying incentives of any platform, and how those incentives can predictably lead to a place people love or a place people hate. Or likely both.

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Facebook came out when I was in college, back when it was limited solely to college campuses and university email addresses.

I remember a day when I was in my room in the fraternity house, and had posted something to Facebook from my flip phone for the first time. Back then, if you posted from mobile your post would have “Posted from Facebook mobile” appended to the end, akin to the more modern “Sent from iPhone”.

This post led to an endless amount of shit given to me by numerous fraternity brothers. We were all experts at said shit-giving, and this was perfect material, as social media and phones weren’t dots we had connected as a society yet.

It seems so quaint now.

I was there in the early days of Twitter as well. And Instagram. And LinkedIn. Not to mention their collective predecessor, MySpace, where everyone could have a playlist built right into their page.

Again, quaint.

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When Substack first released their Notes feature, I casually observed the Twitter-esque space with curiosity. And some hesitation.

Substack seemed like a protected space. A space where writers, readers, authors, journalists, bloggers, and thinkers can congregate and ruminate on what’s interesting to them in the moment, without the intrusion of the capital machine.

When I first started writing on Substack, I compared it to the early days of WordPress, or Blogger, or LiveJournal, but with more modern tools for discoverability and connecting with other writers, alongside their core business model - the ability to monetize your writing baked right into the platform. It wasn’t a new idea. Just a better one.

And then Notes came along, with understandable suspicion from the folks that were used to Substack being…something else. Something less social media-like.

But over the past few months of using Notes, an observation hit me that is the root of this post.

Notes felt different.

But why?

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It only takes a few minutes of scrolling to understand why.

When you use Notes, it doesn’t take long until you’re pulled into an interesting piece written by a fellow Substacker.

Like this no bullshit guide to reading your way to success.

Or this beautiful piece on a dad taking his son’s education into his own hands.

Or this poetic and thought-provoking piece on suicide.

Or this eye-opening post about sunglasses and skin cancer.

Or the post that continues to make noise on what constitutes a writer.

(For what it’s worth, I think you should write.)

Those are all articles that I discovered within the past week, simply by scrolling Notes and seeing the articles shared by someone else, with their commentary on why it’s worth a read.

Notes felt, and feels…slower.

Where other social media is chaotic and attention-grabbing and noisy and scripted, Notes feels more like strolling the aisles of a library until you find the title that grabs you.

My task wasn’t to scroll for minutes or hours on end until something snaps me back to reality. My task was to scroll until a piece captures my attention.

Which brings me back to incentives.

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Substack has had straight-forward incentives from the beginning.

Writers write interesting articles. And people that enjoy and appreciate those writers have the option to upgrade to a paid subscription, typically giving them access to more content from the creator.

Substack takes a small piece of that paid subscription, and that’s how they make money.

The incentives make sense. And they don’t require the grotesque world of online advertising to work.

Notes works because the incentives work.

Substack built a community of writers, and they’re incentivized as a business to drive users to those writers’ posts.

So Notes has become not a space of attention capture, but a space of directing your attention to the most interesting pieces in their ecosystem. The better they get at that, the more money they make.

Contrast that with LinkedIn, where the incentives don’t make sense.

LinkedIn used to be one of my favorite spaces on the internet. Then they baked algorithms and advertising into the user experience, and the whole thing feels disjointed. Not to mention the lack of quality content. They had their paid products, but that revenue growth wasn’t enough. So they threw a social network on top of it, and now…we get what we get.

Instagram tried to make e-commerce work. But it didn’t. Nor do most of their other paid strategies.

So Instagram, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and every other social platform devolve into advertising mechanisms with no viable path beyond that.

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That’s my case for slow social.

And why Substack continues to feel different than every other place on the web.

The incentives make sense. It’s slower. It pulls you deeper into a topic, not wider into a shallow bath of distraction. And that’s good for Substack and good for the user.

I don’t see how existing social platforms become anything more interesting than what they already are.

But for the platforms of the future?

Start with the right incentives, that don’t begin and end with advertising.

Create a model that doesn’t require the attention economy as its backbone.

Build social on top of that model, where the incentives stack on one other, like Notes and Substack.

Is Substack infallible?

Of course not. They’re at risk of devolving and pandering to the attention economy as much as anyone else.

But for now?

It remains slow. It remains deep.

And it’s the place I want to be, where every other platform seems to push me away.

I can’t be the only one?

Want to become a leader worth following?
Let’s chat.

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✌️ and ❤️,

Adam Griffin