Substack is the Medium of newsletters; the content is neither rare nor well-done. I'm not surprised they need to dump staff; their business model was never sustainable. Why should I pay to read some wanker's opinions in my inbox when I can read a whole bunch of other wankers' opinions for free using their RSS feeds, without having to worry about whether any of these wankers are selling their mailing lists to make a little extra cash on the side?
I have a day job and write on Substack. I am barely able to post once a month, sometimes less. I still have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of paying subscribers. I think it's an exceptional format.
Actually now that I think of it, zero of the people whose writing I would pay for are "writers" by trade, which is part of the dullness problem of consumer media.
True, there are actually some real writers worth reading on substack, but imo, not enough of them, and even less of them that I would be willing to pay to read - heck, I won't even pay to read a newspaper online anywhere as you can get it almost all for free someplace else with a few clicks.
Seems like an attempt to monetize free blogs, problem is, there are still plenty of other free blogs to read - they haven't gone away.
Substack is also a way to financially support writers and artists who have been pushed out of traditional media, or are too niche to fit in mass market publications.
It would help writers and readers if Substack bundled groups of writers together, perhaps by genre/type/subject like a magazine, and for the current cost of one subscription newsletter have 5 newsletters that the subscriber/paying customer can choose to assemble to create their personal "magazine." This would allow the reader to financially support more writers/artists, which would allow more of them to continue publishing their work and grow.
Alternatively, if I care what you have to say, you're probably not a professional writer. Maybe there's a better way to do it than we've seen so far, but I have yet to watch someone go that route without overhyping every little thing, stretching the truth, and then outright making stuff up.
The last thing I want is to get another email list.
For me email is a big ball of stress, there is always a huge amount of spam to delete, even if I keep up on unsubscribing from lists and blocking addresses that send me spam.
When I am reading email I am generally trying to get some specific task done and having email newsletters get in the way means I'm going to skip over the newsletters and never read them.
What the world needs is an RSS reader which is like that Talking Heads song Psycho Killer: "See something once, why see it again?"
You would probably be better served by fixing your damaged relationship with the techology rather than declaring it to be the wrong answer a priori. Perhaps a middle ground, like Thunderbird or Vivaldi's RSS readers, would suit you. Don't use the clients for mail, just try it out as a feed reader only, to avoid the negative expectations.
One of the big advantage of the mail-style presentation is the client indexes the content and gives you full-text search of the stories you've read. Once you get used to that it's hard to go back.
I think an ongoing, robust RSS ecosystem is a major thorn in the side of any substack-like business model.
Their target consumer (affluent/intellectual enough to pay for access to ideas) has access to a far wider variety of arguably better content if they're willing to build up a set of RSS feeds.
Maybe there's room to build a company on top of the RSS ecosystem, but it's difficult when free, feature-rich, and high quality alternatives exist.
However, as a publisher/bundler of paid RSS feeds, they have a big conflict of interest in offering an RSS reader. Like Spotify and their "exclusive" podcasts, they have an incentive to push bland content and obscure the rich niches that make the RSS ecosystem actually-valuable.
In this scenario, Substack is Spotify. They look at who was doing well on the RSS circuit (the top 1% of bloggers), pay them to abandon RSS and have them post within the confines of your walled garden.
Even in the paid substacks, some fraction of the articles are available for free. And the articles that are reserved for paid subscribers still display enough of the beginning of the article to get the most important points across.
First few of those it found had a lot of links, sure!, but no commentary around them to explain why they are awesome which is the other half of the discovery problem, no? If I have to click 50 links to find out what they are - and they generally link to the RSS, mind, without a link to the website which means that clicking will only give me a "Do you want to open this in ReadKit?" prompt - I've got better things to do with my time, really.
That's a fair criticism. I'd very lightly push back that sifting through some random links might very well be worth your time if you spend a large amount of time in an RSS reader. I also think it's table stakes for a good feed reader to make it easy to add/remove feeds, for the sake of sampling new ones.
There's probably a better way to discover than sifting through large lists with zero commentary, but if you're starting from literal zero, a big list isn't an awful place to start.
It'd be interesting to seed some pagerank-like crawler with blogs you enjoy, so you could use its outputs as your "try this out" list. I've experimented with building something like it in the past, it's an entertaining task for sure.
Some bloggers also have handy pages designed to give you a high-strength outbound signal, e.g. https://jvns.ca/blogroll/. It's worth seeking those out, where they exist.
I used Feedly every day. I don't actually use it to discover RSS feeds, though; more often I see some site and put it into their Add function, and it finds the feeds in it.
Some stories are still behind paywalls (e.g. The Local in Munich), but you can at least read the headlines.
Real writers have day jobs.