why i surrendered to substack
and why i reserve the right to resume hostilities at a later date
Welp, I’ve done it. I’ve finally caved. After three whole years resisting the allure of Substack, I’ve finally decided to make it the primary outlet for future Down The Ladder pieces.
To longtime readers, the email in your inbox (or the update in your RSS feed, when I get around to mirroring it) no doubt appeared to be at least a startling surrender, if not a betrayal. You are probably in want of an explanation for why I have properly joined this website just in time for everyone to start hating it loudly and publicly. I have taken a break from wiping copious amounts of egg off of my face in order to offer one.
The reason I opted to go the route of an independent, off-platform blog instead of jumping on the Substack bandwagon when I started Down The Ladder in 2023 was largely about control. Starting a Substack would have been far easier, but I was already suspicious of the platform’s trajectory (Notes had been recently introduced, and the stench of bloat and eventual enshittification was all over them), and, to be quite honest, I just liked the technical and aesthetic independence that came with having my own website with its own domain, and was willing to sacrifice some of the potential reach of my work in order to get it.
This independence, though, was largely illusory for two reasons:
It took quite a lot of time to spin up the bespoke mailing list solution that the blog used, and - to keep a very long story short - the solution that I eventually landed on was paying $20/mo to a glorified wrapper for Amazon Web Services for the privilege of sending out emails to a very small audience. I had done all that work to remain in a big tech ecosystem with extra steps.
I literally had a YouTube channel. I was not at all free from algorithmic pressure or the comorbidities thereof. Because the reach of the YouTube channel dwarfed that of the blog a hundred-fold, I found myself starting to select ideas for pieces that were more video-friendly, which naturally began to lead me away from the shorter, more conceptual pieces of social criticism that inspired the creation of the blog in the first place. The idea that I was going to accept dependence on Google for the sake of my work’s reach but draw a red line at Substack was an absolutely absurd position that only grew more absurd as the burdens of maintaining the site, newsletter, and YouTube channel grew.
My suspicion of Substack as a platform - from its editorial choices to its (lack of) profitability - hasn’t gone anywhere. What I’ve realized, though, is that I have to build infrastructure for each of my projects that actually serves the best interests of each of those projects, and Down The Ladder would clearly be better served as a Substack blog in dialog with other blogs and writers on the platform than as an indie web enclave (with a YouTube channel attached).
This is not true of my other projects: From The Superhighway and Unplatform have done quite well for themselves in their respective niches, and those projects have (mostly) off-platform tech stacks that serve their interests nicely. But, when I’m writing for to Down The Ladder - an outlet whose main purpose is to allow me to engage with contemporary discourse - I should probably put the writing where the contemporary discourse is happening. For better or for worse, at the moment it’s happening on Substack, so that’s where I ought to be.