So life has been busy, thanks to travel and other writing commitments: normal service will return soon. In the interim, something that I’ve been thinking about for a bit.
I’ve occasionally mentioned that I haven’t turned on paid subscriptions for this site, and don’t intend to (I have thought about making it impossible even to say that you want to pay, but that seems churlish towards the significant number of people who have already sent a costly signal; I should perhaps have done this at the start). This isn’t because I am an unusually generous person, but because I prefer a pure gift exchange relationship, and worry about the ways in which the nexus between social media and money can distort your priorities and even your sense of self.
Recently, I’ve been able to articulate the second set of worries to myself a little better. A lot of people complain about Substack, very often riffing on the Nazi bar analogy. I don’t think that this is right - despite years of repeated analogizing, the Nazis don’t particularly seem to be on the verge of taking over. But I do think that there is a more subtle danger. Substack’s incentives, unsurprisingly, are to make money for its investors. This leads to the site unsubtly trying to get its writers - particularly those who have acquired a significant audience - to monetize like hell, so that Substack can take its cut.
And this, in turn, can lead to certain self-reinforcing patterns among unusually prolific and successful writers on the platform. NB: I am absolutely not saying that all such writers have fallen victim to this problem, nor am I going to start naming names. But these patterns seem sufficiently common to me to be worth writing about.
These patterns sum up to the pundit’s trilemma. If you want to succeed in getting lots of paid readers on Substack, you have strong incentives to do three things: (1) post frequently, (2) post authoritatively, and (3) post about everything.
Posting frequently is the most commonly mentioned path towards building up a real income on Substack. Those who post a few times a week are likely to attract more readers than those who post once a week (as I aspire to, without getting guilty if I leave a couple of weeks go by), while those who post irregularly might as well abandon all hope of becoming a top earner.
Posting authoritatively means, in the weak sense, writing as if you absolutely know what you are talking about. For better or worse, a certain kind of self assurance seems to attract mass readership. In the stronger and better sense, it means posting with actual authority: only writing posts that draw upon your own expertise, whether formally visible (you are an academic, or someone with decades of experience in the industry or whatever) or informal (you have the right combination of obsession and particular interests to have really mastered some particular niche of the infosphere, in ways that become obvious to readers).
Posting about everything means being prepped to keep your readers informed about a news cycle where lots of disparate things keep on happening. Perhaps, today, there is a political scandal in North Dakota. Perhaps tomorrow, there are riots in Belfast. As much as possible, you want to be prepared to tell your readers everything they need to know, so that they can feel they have mastered the intricacies of scandal, riots and the other undelightful surprises of a variegated world, and go back to their ordinary life.
The point, as the title of this post suggests, is that this is a genuine trilemma. Assuming ordinary human limitations, an individual poaster can’t really do all three at once. It is possible, with effort, to post regularly and to post with real authority, so long as you confine your writing to topics where you have genuine expertise. It is possible to post frequently about everything, as long as you abandon all aspirations to authority. And it is possible to post authoritatively about everything you might want to write about, if you abandon all ambitions of timeliness, and actually devote the necessary time to doing serious research on new topics as they emerge. But succeeding at all at once? Nope. You cannot simultaneously maintain quality across all three.
The fact that it cannot be done well does not, of course, mean that people don’t try to do it. Again, the incentives of the Substack platform tend to drag you in this direction. If you want to make a living from being a Substack pundit, and Substack would like you to at least try, then trilemma-maxxing is the most obvious path towards doing this. But you simply can’t do all three at once without compromise.
Casual empiricism would suggest that the most usual way for pundits to cut corners is substituting fake authority for the real thing. If you seem sufficiently self-confident, you can get away with quite surprising amounts of bullshit. This is especially so if you decline to acknowledge the times when you actually have gotten it horribly wrong, sailing on magisterially while ignoring carping and criticism from mere mortals. Your continued and substantial income from readers provides sole and sufficient vindication for your courage in ignoring the begrudgers.
That, then, helps explain why I don’t let people pay to subscribe to Programmable Mutter. I don’t want to even get started down that path, which has led certain writers, who I used to quite like, badly astray. Again, I don’t want to name names. Nor, as I have already said, do I believe that all successful writers on Substack have fallen victim to these particular failings (some have avoided them completely; others are at least somewhat successful in skipping through the bear-traps). Nor do I pretend to any particular superiority myself (I try to avoid those particular pitfalls, but may not succeed as well as I fancy, and to the extent that I do succeed, surely fall into others). Finally, I’m unusually lucky in having a job that gives me both income security and a lot of flexibility, allowing me to take this position. I’m able to separate my purely personal writing from any direct income stream - others, very reasonably, can’t.
I like the formulation of this trilemma, which is similar to the engineer/designer's trilemma: You can have something good, cheap or quickly; choose two.
Personally I like Substack as it is full of very interesting stuff. But that’s the problem - there are too many posts - I would estimate that I only get to maybe 20% of what I want to read. So I actually like those authors who post infrequent but with very insightful writing.