The End

And thanks for all the fish.

Two years today, I posted for the first time on Substack.¹ Blogging wasn’t new to me — I’ve had WordPress blogs since 2010² — but Substack was.

I’ve published 90 posts here in two years (this is #91) and met a number of interesting people. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed my time here, but for a number of reasons, I’ve decided Substack isn’t for me.

While I enjoy blogging as a handy platform for my own writing — which is pretty much solely for myself — social media is anathema to me. I really do believe it’s one of the key things wrong with the modern world. Substack leans hard into the social media side, and I just can’t be a part of that.³

I also find Substack’s aggressive subscription model a bit off-putting. I have an abiding counterculture notion that, other than sites explicitly selling products, if it’s on the internet, it should be free — literally public domain.⁴ So, I’ll never be comfortable being a paid subscriber, and in the environment here I feel slightly unwelcome and something of a mooch.

I find myself challenged even on the general level of participating in the social aspects of blogging: following and reading other blogs, engaging with their content, getting to know other authors, etc. I do enjoy that aspect of things and made it part of my life for many years, but found it has a downside. It takes too much time away from my own projects, and lately I’ve become increasingly jealous of that time.⁵

The Substack Algorithm, based on what I’ve heard from others and observed myself, seems tuned for high-frequency posting, both in Notes and Newsletters. The more one posts, it seems, the more visible one’s publications. In avoiding Substack Notes (almost entirely these days) and posting infrequently, I’m sure I’ve become fairly invisible to The Algorithm.⁶

Which is irrelevant to me, but what isn’t is the time sink. It turns out that, for me, three blogs are one too many. Especially now that I’m trying to devote more time to my long-neglected programming blog.

This all falls under the rubric of “It’s Not You; It’s Me.” I’ve been an outlier my entire life. I learned long ago that large parts of the world aren’t my cup of tea. I live out on the flats of the Bell curves on damn near everything.

That said, under the other heading, “It’s Definitely You”, is that Substack’s software is … bemusing to me. The choices seem contrary to the idea that this is a writer’s platform. Maybe from an early twentieth century point of view where “writers” just produce fairly basic text. Maybe with some long-established text formatting like italics or bold.⁷

But no font control other than your blog’s overall (rather constrained) font setting. No ability to insert or edit HTML. Images are centered with no support for wraparound text. No image library for image reuse. The LaTeX widget is kinda nice, but apparently people complain that it’s buggy when viewed on phones. Certainly, it doesn’t allow inline LaTeX. No support for programming source code with syntax highlighting. All in all, fairly primitive.

Then there’s the schizophrenic way that comments on posts can only be straight text (not even italic or bold, let alone images or source code), but Notes and comments on Notes can leverage those and a bit more.⁸

On top of all that, Substack apparently doesn’t have online help. Or any help. I reported a problem over a year ago to that Ai thing, was assured I’d hear back before too long, and of course never heard back.

The bottom line is that I’ve decided Substack isn’t for me.

And so, I say “Goodbye!” and exit stage left.⁹

… And that’s a wrap.

1. See:

Hello, World!

2. Two abandoned ones (of no interest) and two active ones:

My general topics blog: Logos con Carne

My programming blog: The Hard-Core Coder

3. Substack Notes is 99.9% useless chaff with 0.1% wheat. I don’t care how good the wheat is, it’s not worth the chaff. (Or per my shit-covered raisin metaphor, only 0.1% raisin.)

4. I have counterculture notions about copyright in general.

5. There is also that I weary of topics such as human consciousness, cosmology, free will, morality, or quantum mechanics interpretations. These are areas where — thus far — no consensus, let alone certain knowledge, is possible. I find I can become semi-permanently satiated after exploring and discussing such topics.

6. Especially, I suspect, in shunning Notes.

7. Generically: emphasis and strong.

8. It’s a pain having to: [1] create a Note with some code or an image I want to share with the author of a blog post; [2] copy the link to that Note; [3] create a comment responding to the post with an explanation and the link to the Note.

9. When I was young and my parents took us to visit another couple with kids, Sister and I learned that, when our folks called out to us that we were leaving, we had at least 20 more minutes of playtime because our folks would stand at the door talking to their folks and spend kid-eons getting around to actually leaving.

So, I resolved that in my life, when it was time to leave, I’d just say “Goodbye” and go.