I was wrong to hate Substack - and why I think YOU should start a Substack

This blog is written with great pride in honour of not not Talmud reaching 1000+ Substack subscribers.

I used to hate Substack. I was sad when Scott Alexander moved his blog there, and shed a tear when every other writer I liked did the same. I thought Substack was ruining the blogosphere — it made every blog seem bland, collapsing personalized corners of the internet, each with their own layouts and quirks, into the same boring template. I worried the metrics would create the wrong incentives for blogging, and worst of all, I worried Substack would end up destroying blog archives once it inevitably failed, or simply buried them behind forced logins and paywalls.

I was wrong about Substack, and I’m here to repent for my sins — I mean, I’m here to tell you why I think you should start a Substack now. I moved to Substack with great angst, but now, just over one year later, I wish I migrated much earlier.

I was wrong about Substack in two ways:

I previously believed Substack wouldn’t increase the number of people blogging. Since it’s always been easy to start a WordPress blog, I figured that anyone who wanted to blog would just do so. Seeing the sheer number of new bloggers, this is obviously false — there is now so much incredible content that otherwise wouldn’t exist without Substack.

The second is that I didn’t think Substack offered anything new of value — and this is what I was most wrong about. In my old blog, even after I had pieces that people genuinely enjoyed — including links and shares from people like Tyler Cowen — none of it converted into anything longer lasting. If I wrote a new piece, nobody would read it because there was no built in audience. It was discouraging. Sure, you could build up enough of a following that people subscribed to your RSS feed and you became part of the “blogosphere” — but the bar to get there was exceptionally high. Substack helps people find an audience in an unbelievable way. By making it much easier to engage with content, writers get much better feedback and have an easier time finding their niche.

So here is my case for why I think you should start a Substack (really, just random musings on why I think more people should write). But seriously - if you are writing this, I would love to read your content, so please share with me anything you write and are proud of or want feedback on!

A lot of people are scared to blog because they think they’re bad writers — bad at grammar, prose, syntax, and so on. But blogging is almost entirely about ideas, not writing per se. Your excuse is a bit like saying you can’t be a great photographer if you weren’t good at drawing with a pencil as a kid. With AI, this is a now also a mostly solved problem.

Everyone has ideas to contribute. You don’t need to write a blog post on par with Meditations on Moloch (but who does?) to add value — even just curating links, writing book reviews, or sharing recommendations of blogs you like makes the internet a better place. For context, one of my favourite bloggers is Tony Gao, who has never written a single longform post.

A lot of people think blogging is only for grand ideas, and tell themselves they’ll either save their big ideas for the future, or only start blogging once they have something grand to say. But one of the secrets of blogging is that plenty of grand-idea posts flop, and many silly, random small posts become hits. I wrote a small, silly post about buying five babkas to try, and it ended up being discussed on a well-known film podcast. My post about how to “manifest” was written as a quick prompt after having tea with Michael Bateman (who I met, where else, on the internet), and it ended up being one of my most popular pieces, with a real impact on a lot of random strangers. Without a blog, all of these smaller ideas get lost - as even you don’t think these ideas are “important”.

Many people are discouraged from blogging because they think that just because nobody IRL finds their ideas interesting, nobody else will. Of the people who know me in real life, fewer than 10 read my blog (including relatives and best friends) - despite me being part of a pretty nerd-compatible community. The world is a very big place—it’s been one of the most surprising and validating things I’ve experienced: learning how much my blog resonates with people, when in my actual life there’s almost total disinterest in these ideas.

I think many people underrate how much ideas spreads on the internet. Most people read a whole lot, and if, eg some random smart person reads your post, you’d probably never know it, but your ideas still may stay in their thoughts and then spread through them. For example, take these two posts I wrote on /r/slatestarcodex - and read these two posts from Bryan Caplan and Jeremiah Johnson — where its clear that both of these people read my post on /r/slatestarcodex and had those ideas stick in their mind. Just because your post doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean your ideas won’t.

me on Tolstoy and Caplan on Tolstoy

me on simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse and Johnson on using simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse

Writing is a form of scaffolding. Once you write about something, you can finally stop ruminating on the idea, let it go, and free up your bandwidth for other things.

Everyone knows writing forces clarity in your thoughts. But the value of writing is much greater than that—most of the time, you don’t even know what your thoughts actually are until you turn on your ‘writing brain’. Being in the habit of writing makes you much more attuned to the world, forcing you to actually notice your own interesting observations and reflections as they happen. When you start taking notes, you finally have somewhere to put your random thoughts that would otherwise get lost to the wind. Slowly, without any real plan or intention, you start noticing how much these ideas relate to each other, and broader connections form in front of you that never would have happened otherwise. This also happens on a bigger scale the more you write: your posts, over time, will slowly reveal who you are and what your values are.

A lot of people are discouraged from writing because they think they already need to have fully formed ideas before they write, but writing is often a process of discovery. Try treating yourself like an LLM. In the same way it’s highly effective to ask an LLM to give you, say, 10 suggested ideas for X, and to say things like “keep going” or “believe in yourself,” try doing this to yourself. Your brain has all sorts of not-fully-formed ideas that, if you tap into the right mindset, you can unleash. Most of these won’t make sense, and anything that has value will be mixed with mostly incoherent and incorrect thoughts. But all of this will sort itself out later when you go back and evaluate your notes and filter out the nonsense. Unless you let yourself enter this mindspace intentionally, you’ll never know about all the great ideas secretly stored in your brain, otherwise inaccessible to you.

When you post a blog, that serves as a time-stamp for when you had your crispest thoughts on that idea, which you can always share with others and refer back to.

Writing a blog will help you meet people on the internet. It makes it easy to show others that you’re of substance, and what kind of person you are. I’ve made countless friends through the internet that wouldn’t have been possible without my blog acting as a representation for who I am. The social aspect of blogging is hugely underrated.

To me, the main benefit of blogging is sharing ideas and getting feedback on them. I genuinely love talking about ideas — especially my ideas — and without writing (and talking with my fiancé), I don’t really have an outlet for that. By writing, I get to share ideas with people who actually care about them, which is incredibly validating. But more importantly, I get to have people critique, improve, and expand on my ideas, which is such a joy.

So with all this in mind, I am announcing several blog bounties for people who I think would make great Substackers. These bounties follow the typical not not Rich Prize structure, so the recipient can either receive the funds directly, or have the funds redirected at 1.25x to a cause or individual of their choice.

$1,000 to Kevin Bryan if he writes two blog posts in the next six months, on any topic (not including a write-up of a Nobel Prize winner). Kevin is maybe the smartest and most interesting person I know, and has so many great insights I’d love to read about. He’s also one of the early-days GOAT econ bloggers, but has long since retired from the blogging world.

$500 to Dan Schulz for writing one blog post in the next three months. Dan is probably the person on the internet most similar to me — the creator of one of my favourite personal websites and the host of a formerly great podcast. I know Dan will be a great writer who writes content I love.

$500 to Damien Moule for creating his own blog and writing one post in 2026. Damien is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to how housing policy actually works in Toronto and Ontario. He writes the 10/10 posts in City Hall Watcher, but I know he has so much more to share.

$250 to Sam Waters for creating a blog and publishing one single blog post before October. I don’t actually know Sam IRL, unlike the others on this list, but he’s a prolific Substack commentator who shows great taste and writes very thoughtful comments — which makes me confident that if he transitioned to medium- or long-form content, it would be fantastic.

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See also:

https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/

https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-more-you-write-the-more-you-begin

https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/

https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast