I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu
One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
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I’ve heard the argument that maybe one can support book-writing by writing a weekly newsletter *while* writing a book. Ideally the newsletter might be exhaust from research or book-drafting sessions. I think is trying this! I’d love to see success stories here.
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Note that this approach is the opposite of a common practice: write a blog for a few years; get popular; staple posts together into a book. I like some of those books, but they usually seemed just as good as blog posts: they don’t seem to be accessing new depths as books.
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Maybe it doesn’t matter if Substack’s model can’t produce book-depth thought. After all, if the model could “only” support the creation of lots more SlateStarCodexes, that would be really incredible!
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Anon friend suggests that much Substack criticism can be read as: "Yeah, [your fave neighborhood restaurant] is great, but I fail to see what they’re doing for world hunger, farming challenges related to depleted soil, etc, to say nothing of how useless it is to dead people"
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I like this framing too!
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people say real intimacy doesn’t scale, but I think personal blogs work bc one-sided intimacy is just as interesting + meaningful as two-sided intimacy. teenage-girl-making-youtube-covers-in-her-bedroom energy is powerful 
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Could be done from/by communities
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For a while I was expecting there to be a Hacker News or subreddit for every industry.
Instead it might spring up as an influencer with a substack, podcast, YouTube channel with a paid community (Patreon, Facebook group, Discord, Slack, or forum)
B2B trade press 2.0
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and maybe Substack will support writing that helps readers change.
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How much correlation is there between claims that reading a book “makes you a better person” and reality?
Some really do achieve this effect! But at least for me it’s usually not the ones which are “supposed to”.