The platform that keeps writers busy
Substack rewards a peculiar kind of writing more reliably than anything else.
The most visible posts on the platform are not excellent takes or writings on politics, culture, or ideas. They are about growth on Substack itself.
Writers announce subscriber milestones constantly, extract arbitrary lessons, and frame them as transferable insight. These posts outperform substantive work with mechanical consistency—hardly an exception.
Substack rewards writing about growth because it has quietly made growth the only thing that reliably circulates.
This “get growth on Substack or die trying” genre presents itself as generosity. Someone climbs the ladder and turns around to explain the rungs. “I don’t gatekeep,” they say.
But the script rarely changes. It’s all the same advice. Post constantly. Live in Notes. Engage relentlessly. Signal momentum. Blah blah.
What differs is not the advice but the audience, a rotating population of writers who want the same outcome and temporarily reward whoever promises it next. A new sucker is born after every publish. The content flatters aspiration while feeding on it. It feels helpful because it offers action in a system where most action no longer compounds.
This pattern is usually described as a discovery problem. Writers assume the work exists in public space and simply needs better distribution, more patience, or cleaner execution. That’s far from reality.
What looks like a discovery failure is actually a dependency structure that most writers have not yet named. Maybe because they don’t know VCs fund Substack, or don’t care.
Substack speaks the language of independent publishing while removing the infrastructure that once made independence legible. Writers believe they are publishing to the open web. In practice, they are publishing inside a sealed corridor that borrows the aesthetics of the internet without its permeability.
The evidence appears in small, maddening ways.
Posts fail to index. Search traffic never arrives or quietly evaporates. External links exist but carry no weight. What I am trying to say, politely, is that Google, Twitter, and social media in general absolutely loathe Substack. And they have their own reasons.
Discovery happens almost entirely inside Substack’s own surfaces, Notes, recommendations, etc. Writers misread this as a marketing failure or a consistency issue and respond by working harder inside the system. More posts. More Notes. More engagement. That’s a fool’s response that isn’t entirely the fool’s fault.
The incentive logic explains both the enclosure and the explosion of growth advice.
Substack does not benefit from making your work discoverable outside its walls. It benefits from keeping attention circulating internally, where subscriptions, recommendations, and status loops can be measured and monetized.
Search engines reward clarity, permanence, and interoperability. Platforms reward velocity, enclosure, and dependence.
These incentives do not align. When they collide, search quietly loses and internal performance quietly wins. When external discovery collapses, internal advice becomes the only thing that feels actionable.
This creates a deeper contradiction.
Substack continues to speak the language of publishing while behaving like a social feed. Publishing assumes an archive that compounds over time. A piece written today should still matter tomorrow. Platforms assume content that decays on contact. Value peaks at release and fades unless constantly refreshed.
Writers think they are building libraries. The system treats their work as perishable material whose primary value lies in short-term engagement. The cost remains invisible until someone tries to leave or until they notice that no one new can arrive without the platform’s permission.
Inside this structure, growth advice becomes a secondary market. It does not solve the underlying problem. It switches the responsibility to writers who just want to write. Writers sell hope to each other inside a closed loop, mistaking motion for progress. Everyone works harder to stay in the same place.
A platform that cannot let your work travel must keep you busy instead. Growth advice is how it does that without saying so. Once that clicks, the exhaustion no longer feels personal. The arms race looks less like ambition and more like containment. And the promise of independence starts to look conditional in a way that is difficult to unsee.