This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Thursday State of the SubStacks: Walking the Tightrope Over the Attention-Economy AbyssAs app‑first feeds and social ephemera threaten the email/blog/tip‑jar core, VC incentives collide with public reason, the brittle economics of “#discoverability” make themselves felt, and it turns...
As app‑first feeds and social ephemera threaten the email/blog/tip‑jar core, VC incentives collide with public reason, the brittle economics of “#discoverability” make themselves felt, and it turns out the hard part is the mechanics of the business finding the sweet spot…Is this thing a serious and sustainable platform business, individual business model, and hence public-reason community? On the plate we have:
vs.:
And:
With a key red flag now appearing to be SubStack Notes <https://substack.com/home> and its associated chonky swol twitter-like feed:
And also on the plate is a note from Mills Baker about what the SubStack team is actually intending SubStack Notes, considered as a social-media feed, to be—a principal channel pushing discoverability:
As I understand it, the key to SubStack’s “Notes” algorithm is that it needs to be one that (i) does not maximize time-on-platform and leaves a bad taste afterwards in the mouths of those who engaged, but (ii) does maximize paid subscriptions to newsletters, and also (iii) leaves readers of “Notes” feeling informed, entertained, and having spent there time learning about interesting things to read. The “how this works” and how you create this New Model Algorithm remains mysterious to me. It is a social network, but not: SubStack has an app. Substack spends a lot of its team’s energy and time getting people to download and then use the app. The app is anchored by its feed. But SubStack is trying as hard as it can to hack the brains of those it attract in a different way. Mark Zuckerberg’s team tries to hack your brain so that you spend as much time as possible on-app, so your glued eyeballs can be sold to attention-seeking advertisers. The SubStack team is trying to optimize for the chain: download → view → discover → subscribe → pay. The desired end result for SubStack is a paid subscriber to somebody’s newsletter/ podcast. And there seeking that requires a substantially different feed than the eyeball-gluing maximize time in-app standard social-media feed. But how, exactly? Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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Thursday State of the SubStacks: Walking the Tightrope Over the Attention-Economy Abyss
Wednesday, 19 November 2025
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