Dear Chris Best: Don’t Let Substack Become Another Feed. Letter to CEO, Substack

The tension between discovery, growth, and the reason many of us came here.

Hi Chris, I’ve only been on Substack for a short time, so I don’t have the scars that many long-time writers do.

What I do have is fresh eyes.

I came here because it felt different from LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and the rest of the engagement industrial complex. The promise wasn’t reach. It was signal.

Write something worth reading.

Build an audience that chooses to be there.

Own the relationship.

That’s a powerful proposition in a world where most creators are renting attention from algorithms.

Lately, though, I find myself wondering what Substack wants to be when it grows up.

Is it a publishing platform that happens to have social features?

Or is it becoming a social platform that happens to host writing?

Those are very different futures.

As a newer Substack writer, I understand why discovery matters. Without recommendations, Notes, and network effects, many of us would never find an audience. The reality is that great writing does not automatically get discovered.

But every platform that optimizes for discovery eventually feels pressure to optimize for engagement.

And engagement has a habit of changing behavior.

Writers start writing for the feed instead of the subscriber.

Short-term reactions begin to outperform long-term ideas.

Volume starts beating depth.

I’ve watched this movie before.

The question isn’t whether Substack should grow. Of course it should.

The question is whether it can grow without importing the incentive structures that made so many other platforms exhausting.

Maybe the answer is yes.

I hope it is.

Because as someone still finding my footing here, the thing that attracted me wasn’t the social graph.

It was the possibility that thoughtful writing could still be the product.

Thanks for reading!