I’ve been using Substack again for the last little while and I’m probably going to drop it once again. However, this time, I would have to say the experience was far better than the first time I tried it.
Pros
The Substack algorithm that shows you the Substack Notes (similar to a Twitter Tweet) of other people is actually really good.
When I started using it, most of the notes that were showing had little to no relationship to my work.
Today though, I find the notes are highly aligned with my work.
In fact, I could probably spend the day just restacking notes (like retweeting) and adding my insights to them.
Even more so, this last week or so, when I have restacked notes and added my insights, most people’s responses seemed to be really positive for the most part, especially when I communicate my work from their perspective.
Cons
Substack doesn’t have a Gaming category on it which is absurd. Yet my framework for life primarily perceives it as a role-playing game. Thus to understand it more easily, you need to understand the aspects of a role-playing game. In other words, if I’m using a metaphor and you don’t understand the metaphor, what I’m communicating will probably not be accessible to you. Effectively what I’m getting at is this. My target audience is not on the platform.
To try to get around this, what I’ve tried to do is tag my content in more accessible ways and also include a subtitle that communicates it in a broader way. For example, I have a post entitled “Who is an Adventurer?” and the subtitle is “Embracing the certainty of uncertainty.” Yet the problem is that Substack does not include post subtitles in the post preview within notes, even though notes are the primary way people discover new authors and publications on the platform. So people can’t see the deeper meaning behind the post. (If the section title of the post was added to the post preview, it would help as well.)
Of course, this leads into a whole other discussion about my target audience and the allegory and metaphors I’m using that comprise my framework but I’ll relay that in another post.
PS. I’ve decided to change my Substack publication name to specifically be “Life’s a Role-Playing Game” to make it as clear as possible what its about. Not sure that will do anything though.