On the (possible) enshitification of Substack

or, why one should never put all one's eggs in any single internet basket

I started blogging in 2008. Back then, facebook barely existed and no-one used it much, and there weren’t any other popular social media sites. The internet was truly decentralized, a constellation of creators vying for your attention from their individual corners of the digital space, a cacophonous outdoor market of tiny stalls where lone artists hawked their wares, hoping to draw you into their websites. The reader was assumed to have a hearty attention span. Much was longform. For years I’d been making zines, which were laborious to create and expensive to distribute. Blogging was revolutionary for me- I could publish my work online for free, and anyone could read it, also for free. No more printing or shipping costs!

I bought a wordpress domain (carrotquinn.com) and started blogging about my life. I was still compulsively uprooting myself, hitchhiking across the country solo, riding freight trains, eating from dumpsters- so this gave me a lot to write about. (Many of those stories, as well as stories from my earlier zines, eventually made it into The Sunset Route, and I took them off my blog.) Lots of other writers were blogging too, and I dug around online, looking for people to befriend. I found Tara Burns and Jill Homer, who became huge influences on me and my writing life. Tara wrote a blog called Hobo Stripper- she was queer and from Alaska, and at the time she was living in her van and travelling around the lower 48 doing sex work, as well as parking in remote locals to snare rabbits and gather plants to make herbal medicine. She was one of the best writers I’d ever read. I emailed her, and we became friends- a year later I got a craigslist ride from Oregon to Alaska so that we could meet IRL on the land she ended up buying in the Alaskan interior. (My craigslist driver flipped the car into a snowbank in the Yukon in ten below weather and the other riders and I ended up hitching the rest of the way- that story, and the story of Tara and I meeting in person, are also in The Sunset Route.)

Jill’s blog was about her bonkers-level outdoor adventures- she would ride her fatbike or walk, pulling a sled, hundreds of miles through the snow in the dead of winter, until she was delirious and low-key hallucinating, and in between these wild feats of endurance she would run, and hike, and bike like it was her full time job, and write about these endeavors, as well her emotional life and internal world, almost every single day. She’s on substack now too, and this piece she wrote is so beautiful it made me cry. She also turned some of her adventure writings into a series of books- this one, Meanwhile the World Goes On, about her experience on the Iditarod Trail Invitational, is my favorite, and a friend and I once took turns reading it aloud to each other in our tent at night on a backpacking trip.

When I started long-distance hiking in 2013 and blogging every day from the trail is when things started to pick up a bit for me. People love a trail journal, and while I never got crazy amounts of readers (I think my blog had seven thousand subscribers at its peak) it was enough for me to have an audience to sell my first book to, Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart.

Readers’ interest in blogs fell off a cliff once social media became more popular, and the writers I knew diversified, turning to instagram and facebook and whathaveyou to keep themselves in front of their audiences. Gone were the rambling, intimate posts about what you ate for breakfast and what you thought about on your dog walk and the new woodshed you were building, the kind of writing that made you feel like you were hanging out with the author, sharing a cup of coffee as they told you about their day. People love blogs because they make the reader feel less alone. The vibe of a blog is much more intimate than social media- instagram feels like being in a room with a bunch of other people, watching a performance. Blogs feel like an email from a friend on a roadtrip, rambling about what gas station snacks they ate and how their tent leaked when they camped in the desert. Interestingly, tiktok feels the same to me- as opposed to being in a room with others it’s just you and the people who pop up on your For You Page, sharing a private moment. And some of the most popular content on tiktok are posts that feel like how blogs used to be- Get Ready With Me, for example- a woman sans makeup applies seventeen different skincare products while talking about her plans for the day and how she didn’t sleep well last night. There are thousands of “day in my life” posts- my routine after work, go thrifting with me, come make lunch for my ten kids with me, day in my life as a stay-at-home dog dad, pack my small business order with me. For years social media has become more and more polished, to the point of being totally contrived. (The saying is that everything on instagram is fake, and even if it's real, it’s fake.) What people want, is to feel connected. They want intimacy. They want to see their own experiences, their own insecurities, their own fears, reflected back at them from others. They want to feel less alone. And this is one reason tiktok is so wildly popular right now- the people love an unscripted ramble, bare faced in pajamas and with bad lighting, like a facetime call from a friend.

So the renewed popularity of blogging as well, here on substack, makes sense.

Every popular social media site has had a brief period during which it was an excellent place to grow one’s platform as an artist- and then that period ended. This is because so far, popular social media sites have all followed a certain pattern- in the beginning, they show your content to your followers. People follow you and then they see your stuff. Not only that, but as long as you create something quality and follow the rules of the algorithm, the site will make your content discoverable to new people, and you can grow your platform within the site itself, instead of funneling people there from somewhere else (like your blog). Great! So you put more and more of your content on that site, more and more of your eggs into that one basket. Then everything changes- the social media site will now no longer show your stuff to your followers unless you pay the site, and the algorithm has become so hairbrained and fickle as to be completely unknowable. Sorry!

Most recently this happened with tiktok- for a while, if you made quality content, their For You Page would put that content in front of new people, and when those people followed you tiktok would continue to show your content to them. Not anymore. Currently, the tiktok algorithm is an all-knowing yet godless, amoral beast who serves no-one but its ByteDance overlords. You could have a wildly popular tiktok account where you decorate miniature cakes in a miniature bakery and one day the algorithm will just… stop showing your videos to your two million followers. Alternately, you could have five hundred followers and the algorithm will decide to show one of your videos to four million people, and never show any of your other videos to anyone ever again. For a while, creators tried to work with the new algorithm- the thing was to post thirty second videos! No, ten minute videos! Edit your videos in capcut! No, edit them within the app! Eventually everyone gave up, and creators on the platform now generally agree that the algorithm has completely lost its mind and if you’re on there just for fun that’s fine but if you want your content to actually reach your followers in a consistent way you’re SOL.

(There’s an excellent article about this called The Enshitification of Tiktok, and here’s someone doing a synopsis of the article on tiktok if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing.)

So this is how social media has played out over the last fifteen years, for artists. And the good old fashioned blog, or rather the newsletter, has stood steadfastly by as an antidote to this boom/bust cycle- if you have a blog/newsletter, your readers will always, always get your content, because it goes straight to their email- while there’s no option for magical discoverability that will explode your platform overnight- just slow and steady word of mouth and years and years of tireless work- there’s also no middle-man throttling things or holding things ransom, making you jump through a million algorithmic hoops and then taking the attention of your followers away entirely.

Substack claims to be the first thing, the blog/newsletter, the safe haven in the storm of social media madness, old reliable. And I think for a while it probably has been. It’s been nice to return to blogging here, and to read others’ long-form pieces, to lose an hour in my armchair with my dogs on my lap reading someone’s rambling thoughts about their small-town city council meeting or how going surfing reminded them of their dead dad. And holding myself to a weekly-ish writing practice feels good- it can be hard but it’s also very, very fun. I believe that stories belong to people, and blogging is the most unpretentious, people-based writing there is, aside from actually getting an email from your friend on a roadtrip.

Ever since I joined substack in February, though, the platform has been changing- sometimes almost daily. There is now “notes”, which is essentially a For You Page- it doesn’t show me just the notes from people I’m subscribed to but also notes it thinks I might like- this is an algorithm, this is discoverability. You can now follow someone instead of subscribing to them- with a subscription you get their blog posts via email, with a follow you only see their notes. Substack is now a social media site, as well as a blog. Since it’s now a social media site, who’s to say it won’t follow the boom/bust cycle of all the other popular social media sites that came before it? Although substack is currently making a heckload of money from its cut of writers’ subscription payments, how long until that’s just not enough, and it begins its own slow enshitification? So far, substack still feels cozy, it feels small and intimate and safe, like we’ve discovered something unknown, together. The other social media sites felt that way in the beginning too.

So! I am going to retain a healthy amount of cynicism while I write here. I am going to have fun as long as it lasts, while holding the knowledge that nothing on the internet lasts forever, and that its important to not put all one’s eggs in any internet basket. Thanks for continuing to read my words on this every-changing internet. Some of you have been with me since 2008. That’s like a thousand years in internet time, and I am grateful for that continued gift of attention more than I can say.    

Also, there’s still spots in my April Utah guided hikes- let me help you build your gear list and get comfortable with cross-country navigation ahead of your long hike, or just join because you want to hang in the dez! It’s gonna be really nice. Deets are here.

Bye for now,

Carrot