Substack blogging is very different from old-school blogging. The Substack culture puts much more emphasis on writing daily in order to maintain engagement, and to closely target those daily posts to a market that will open its wallets. And not necessarily because that market is being well informed but because it finds cultural validation in the writer's views. The result is that a lot of successful Substack bloggers are essentially repeating the same basic talking points again and again, never saying anything really new or substantial.

Ever talk to a YouTuber who started out hoping to share detailed info on the things they were personally passionate about, but then felt pressure to tailor their stuff to the algorithm and water it down in order to maintain any audience at all? Substack is the same economy.

What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?

I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.

I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.

Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.

"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.

> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now

How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.