An Algorithm Is a Living Thing

review #05

No longer are we living in the age of movies, music, literature, and fashion. We’re well and truly in the Digital Age, perhaps even in the post-Digital Age, looking back at it from the rearview mirror. In the spirit of that claim, I’ve run reviews of Internet-native media: podcasts, social media personalities, short-form videos, video essays, blogs, and now an algorithm.

Here’s Matthew Gasda with a review of Substack Notes:

I’ve been thinking about this piece for a while because writing about an algorithm means writing about a living thing. The subject is evolving in complex ways, so it’s hard to fully generalize and pull out lessons or observations. While I’m going to stick to my original goal, which is writing a review of the Substack Notes algorithm, I increasingly see the Substack Notes algorithm as a response to the evolution of Twitter into X and X into the streaming news platform for the new regime.

I’ve noticed that over the last few months, maybe longer, Twitter is more like a libertarian news network—which I don’t mind, by the way—but much less of an organic community where people are talking to each other. Substack Notes is the opposite. It’s becoming less contrarian, more liberal normie, and more communitarian. You can see networks and subnetworks and sub-sub-subnetworks forming on Substack. You can see conversations evolving. I’ve seen more than one poster remark that Substack in 2025 is, for both better and worse, a lot like Twitter in 2017. That’s my big provisional theory. Substack Notes, clearly designed as a Twitter competitor, has found its stride as the spirit of X has displaced the spirit of Twitter from within.

Now, there are still major differences. Twitter, in all its cringe glory, was a place where you went to see blue checks, where you went to see institutional journalists make grand pronouncements, yell at pro-reply guys, cancel people, panic, and declare which TV shows were good and which TV shows they were addicted to, and new dating trends and all that. Substack is—and by extension, Substack Notes is—way less institutionalized. There’s no real equivalent to the blue check of old. In fact, institutionalist liberals like Becca Rothfeld, who also writes for The Washington Post and got a major book deal, have struggled to develop good vibes^[1] on Substack: to be as influential on Notes as they were on Twitter or in print.^[2]

Mainstream writers like Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Heather Cox Richardson, and Andrew Sullivan all have massive followings and incomes on Substack, but for the most part, those high-earning Substack superstars were fired from or pushed out of much bigger institutions and made use of their firings to justify Substack launches (and got to Substack early). These foundational Substack figures are more like continents on a global map of Substack.com: you can’t really describe what is happening in the local parts of the world by referring to them; they are massive, but irrelevant to local dynamics.^[3]

Substack Notes feels like a symbiotic attachment to these Substack whale accounts, little fish darting along the sides.

Notes is a place where small accounts or new accounts talk like big accounts–and this is also a difference from both Twitter and what has now become X: there’s always a sense of hierarchy and scale when anon accounts or small accounts interact with big accounts on X (and Twitter too was hierarchical; blue checks were regal); on Substack notes, there’s a feeling of equivalency, false or not. On Notes, the terrain is flat. In principle, this is a good thing, but it leads to hundreds and thousands of accounts all making grand pronouncements, theorizing in long form about the philosophy of history, technocracy, and Gnosticism. Sex. The Internet.^[4]

The way Substack Notes is evolving is starting to remind me, unfortunately, of Medium, which promoted itself as a platform for writers, ostensibly serious-minded writers, and ended up largely hosting, and boosting, kitsch. After Medium opened its paywall system to anyone on the platform, the sluices of the slop gates opened, and the site quickly drowned in its own shit. Medium still exists, but it has no influence because it’s too hard to find intelligent writing, or because intelligent writing invalidates itself by attempting to exist there at all.

But the larger point is that there’s an iterative process by which anytime a piece goes viral or successful on Substack, there are not only going to be the unavoidable copycats, but your feed tends to feed you those copycats and the posts about those copycats and people commenting on the copycat posts (because it’s easier to get noticed posting about the big accounts and the big pieces). There’s writing about writing about writing; there’s criticism about smut about criticism of smut; there are endless derivations of solemn, lib ‘Trump is so scary fascism is here’ poasts. Presumably, there is, or could be, greater breadth in the Substack ecosystem, but the algo is winnowing and exploitative. If you’re afraid of Trump, you get more fear porn; if you want smut, you get more smut. This seems intuitive–but if we’re thinking critically about Notes and its algo–it shouldn’t be; we should not want to be animals in a feedlot.

Consequently–because there’s so much banal regurgitation and recirculation of banal pseudo-thinkers–Substack Notes also doesn’t really do… irony, wit. There’s not much concision, suggestion, allusion. For every concise ironist there are a thousand (this might be a generous estimate) very sincere candid, heartfelt confessions, conventional political takes, and undergraduate philosophy screeds. Instead, it’s clear that the algorithm has encouraged people to post constantly in long form or medium form—the sweet spot seems to be 200-words–about whatever they feel like; there’s no punishment for treating Substack notes the way Boomers’ treat their Facebook walls; embarrassing parallels quickly form.^[5]

Writers often screenshot their own Substack or repost their own Substacks.^[6] There’s more video content now, and there are more memes. It’s cognitively exhausting and sometimes demoralizing to spend too much time on the Notes scroll.^[7]

The micro-attention economy of Substack is cannibalizing itself. Notes is taking time away from Substack, from themselves, from the writing. I see post after post about the beautifully written pieces–about brilliant, eye-opening essays–but I’m not reading those essays; I’m reading about others reading about them… which seems contrary to the point of the whole platform.^[8]

Notes is the crack to Substack’s cocaine.^[9]

On Notes, there’s no one looking after your brain. There’s no one protecting you from clickbait and softcore thirst traps. There’s no one deciding what’s worth your time. In fact, the algorithm especially doesn’t care. It wants to steal your time. This is a shameful, exploitative aspect of Substack Notes. Because of this, we’re all encouraged to steal each other’s time and actually spend less time working on our sacred pieces.

The grand irony: notes means less reading and writing on the reading and writing app.^[10]

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^[1] Substack is not cool (Paul Krugman is on Substack)—but there’s a relative cool in the Substack universe.

^[2] And there’s John Ganz, whose career and following are probably on par with Rothfeld, who seems to have the unique ability to be exactly the same on both X and Substack (insufferable)—with none of Rothfeld’s insecurity.

^[3] Whether micro, small, middle-tier, or big, the most successful Substack accounts seem to be the ones maintained by writers who enjoy using Substack and don’t write Substacks about why they’re running Substacks, why they’re on Substack, why it’s not working for them, or why Substack isn’t as good as the journals, and so on.

^[4] I’m like this on my Substack, Novalis, by the way. But I do think it’s worth making a distinction between Substack proper and notes. What’s reasonable in essay form feels needy distilled into a quick take and decimated on Notes–”here’s my Grand Synthesis!!” My own style of philosophizing goes back to my original Medium account from 2016, really just from my own paper journals going back to the time I was 18. I mainly use notes to promote my own work with the assumption that my subscribers are interested in other things I’ve written on other platforms or in print. Occasionally, I share a more developed take that no longer feels appropriate or have a point on acts.

^[5] Which way Western Substacker? Medium or Facebook? Horrifying.

^[6] Guilty.

^[7] The same can also be said of X, and I wonder if the two apps aren’t competing too much against each other or if Substack isn’t competing too much against what X has become. I’d actually prefer it if Notes was pithier and there was less visual data. In other words, I wouldn’t mind if Notes just rocked an old-school Twitter feel shamelessly.

^[8] One Substack mutual and I even recently plotted a print digest of the best Substack delivered to your door every week. Doesn’t that seem better than finishing 30% of 20 pieces and scrolling 10,000 takes in a week? But I’m just describing the magazine, aren’t I? The irony of Substack in general is that you end up speedrunning the history of print culture, in which chaotic, hastily printed pamphlets give way to highly curated, industrialized magazines and newspapers managed (edited) and delivered to cultivated readers.

^[9] You see all the arguments for and against editorial curation play out every day, constantly, in real time. You see and feel why we need both editors and freedom from them at times. Yes, again, except for the spontaneous, naturally occurring genius that pops up on your feed that would never pop up in NYRB or The New Yorker.

^[10] I really wouldn’t mind if I could train an AI to see like me and extract and distill the few useful things that pop up on the feed. I don’t think the process of searching is very useful. Somehow the scroll is not like an old bookstore, where there’s still value in just looking around even if you don’t buy anything.