I agree with her that it feels at times like there are too many expectations of writers on Substack to do things a certain way: to promote ourselves, to engage, to comment, to share, to follow growth hacks, etc, etc. We can try to ignore the self-destructive feelings. We can try to refrain from making a post on Notes that apes successful posts. But the whole design of social media and of Substack’s analytics features is intended to appeal to the primal instincts in human brains. (I appreciate Substack for having robust analytics, but it’s surely designed as a beautiful chart in part to make us chase quick growth, which also benefits them.)
Substack also makes it difficult to avoid Notes because Notes posts are featured on the default home page, which is similar to how Twitter makes “For You” (its viral feed of people you don’t follow who post annoying engagement farming tweets) its default feed. This, I think, is the primary problem with social media. It shoves toxic content into your face whether you consent or not.
My Theory on the Toxicity of Social Media
Media Pre-Social Media
Imagine you are an eleven-year-old boy who wanted to find something to watch in 1997. You could watch TV or convince your mom to take you to Blockbuster. You see Home Alone 3 on the “new releases” shelf. You don’t see Kevin McCallister on the box of the film, but you think, “Well, it’s a Home Alone film, it must be funny! I can’t wait to see the bad guys get hurt!!!” (You are an eleven-year-old boy, after all.)
The movie begins. A bunch of poorly-written mobsters are passing around some kind of nuclear computer chip. They attach it to the bottom of a remote controlled truck and try to take it through airport security. Even as an eleven-year-old boy, you realize how stupid this premise is. Okay, but it’s just the beginning. Let’s get to the part where the bad guys get hurt!
You keep trying to watch, but it still sucks and not in a pleasurable way. You aren’t a masochist. Or maybe you are. Maybe you like to be spanked by the babysitter because she is so pretty and charming. But you aren’t going to submit to being assaulted by a movie as deplorable and witless as Home Alone 3. So you turn it off.
In the end, you chose to rent that movie. You chose to watch it. And you can turn it off when you want.
Afterwards, you might curse the director in your head. If you’re watching with your friend, you will talk about how much it sucked. But there will be no pressure for you to tweet to the world how much it sucked.
There will be no seething desire to tag RajaGosnell in a tweet and tell him to end his career before he is reduced to directing a romance between a chichuahua voiced by Drew Barrymore and another voiced by George Lopez as they run around Beverly Hills saving a rat voiced by Cheech Marin from being eaten alive by Paul Rodriguez in iguana form.
In short, in the old days, people could choose what media they wanted to consume, and the conversation (mostly) ended there. A movie viewer didn’t have to try to be a movie commenter or a person who films their reaction for YouTube. You either like it or you don’t.
Media Today
Now you might waste time watching empty calorie videos on TikTok or YouTube. TikTok has perhaps perfected the concept of the endless scroll. TikTok serves you a short video you didn’t choose to watch. You either keep watching or scroll down. There’s another and another. None of which you chose. People will sit on the bus or in a cafe or somewhere just scrolling down and down and not finding a single video entertaining enough to watch but also not stopping using the app.
Threads might be the worst social media hellscape of all. It is a wasteland of engagement farming. Most of the posts it the app shows you are from strangers asking you to follow them or watch their video. (Follow me so that you can see more posts from me asking for follows!) Oftentimes, they just repeat filler keywords.
Apparently TikTok shares videos of sexist dating advice with its users. For some reason, people feel the need to watch it and comment on it. And if they watch out of rage and leave a dismissive comment, it’s still engagement, and the app will serve you more of the content that makes you engage.
You see some random posts of Johnny Guilbert (who is apparently a social media creation) fed to you by the algorithm, and it annoys you, so you feel the need to say you are annoyed. Rinse, wash, and repeat. No one is happy, but everyone keeps using the same apps because they are junkies. These apps were designed to get people addicted. It’s not entirely your fault any more than it is a smoker’s fault for still smoking when they are trying to quit.
Conclusion
Social media companies are incentivized to put content in front of your face that you will react to. Each app has a slightly different algorithm. Some are better than others. But in general, low-value content that annoys and angers people generates the most engagement. Social media companies want you to respond and keep more engagement going.
Substack, for its flaws, is still mostly a long-form writing platform. Users still have a good deal of control over what kinds of content they are exposed to. And the social aspects of Substack are not without their benefits. They do expose us to new writers we like sometimes.
But overall, the world would probably be a better place: if the media environment and economy incentivized artists to create beautiful long-form content. If writers could focus on writing and not promoting their social media channels. (And maybe that’s one unintended benefit of the death of Twitter and Facebook as traffic funnels.) We all live in a world we didn’t create, so I don’t blame writers and artists for trying to survive in this world. I hope the post-Twitter world is a better world for writers and readers, too.