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 don't think this is an incentives problem, I think this is the market correctly sorting for what people want. They don't want book-depth thought; they want it shorter & faster. The book-depth blog sellers have the wrong model - because there literally is no model besides books.
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I think there’s a 2x2 here of thought and format. Many books are newsletter-depth long-form, but the most important books involve much deeper thought—years of accumulated insight. Substack promotes newsletter-depth short-form. Can one create a market for years-deep short-form?
Some short stories might qualify: there are Borges and Chiang stories which involve more insight than most books I’ve read. Not sure about the market side there.
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This blog post of mine (considered by many to be my best piece of writing) represents a year of struggling with a question both conceptually and experientially. Nearly 4k words, but still a blog post.
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Part of the issue though is that I can only write 1-3 such posts in a given year.
Maybe a collective/curated newsletter that each author gets to submit 1-3 items to per year?
Hmm.
Now I'm imagining a print magazine you can read by the fire with a cup of cocoa.
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