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I bought into Bari Weiss' theory and the narrative she is making a lot of money from the substack and alternate journalism. I started consuming a lot of substack content; after a few months, I realized most of the substack content I got recommended were people ranting about social change happening in America. It is interesting to read for a few weeks. After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.

Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.

My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.



Agreed, the disgruntled are the only people willing to pay specific journalists with specific missions to effect change. Everyone else would just either pay a flat fee for general information about X, or would pay nothing.


I think that is more telling of the substack content you were reading, This is like people that complain YT feeds them more of the same content they watched??

If read a bunch of stacks that are complaining about social change why would you expect substack to recommend you sports content....

>>After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.

You might, others do not.


You may be suffering from a recommendation system flaw. I subscribe to several Substack newsletters and have no content similar to what you've described. Instead, I read mostly about economics and parenting.


Strongly disagree. I read finance news and stock writeups on Substack and the platform has a vibrant community in this category. Newsletters like Grit, Doomberg, The Science of Hitting, and others are doing great, valuable work and have pretty big followings.


Likewise. I follow several thoughtful creators like Asianometry[0] and haven't seen anything like what GP's describing.

[0] https://asianometry.substack.com/


You’re uncritically equating disgruntled to niche. It seems to me that the disgruntled view is the mainstream view.

Jonathan Haidt is an interesting example. He’s basically the foremost expert on an emergent problem.


Well, the non disgruntled are mostly sheep consuming mainstream content. It's not like newsletters are for mass audiences




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