“Is Substack just an orange Twitter 2.0?”

I came across this question on Laura London’s Notes and figured it deserved a good answer, so here’s mine. I really, really hope someone weighs in. 🙏❤️

Such a fantastic question, hilariously worded, (orange twitter 2.0) and worthy of a sincere answer. I hope you respond with brutally honest thoughts.

And not just because I want my own blog to be a hotbed of engagement, but because I’m a really generous dialectician. Try me if you have the stones.

I desperately want to engage deeply with YOU. I’m more than happy to do it for free. I guess that’s self-interested in a way. So be it. Having you talk with me here, on my own blog, is just more convenient, frankly.

At the end of this post, I’ll give you a glimpse of Laura London’s shtick or what I know of it so far. Subscribe and follow her if it looks interesting to you.

It’s a Christianity-related blog, which is normally not my thing, to put it mildly. But in the case of Laura London, it just might be worth my time. Which is part of what’s cool about Substack. More on that in a minute.

Let’s get into the spirit of Darrenski’s beautiful and likely rhetorical question.

He asked: Why is substack worth it? Is it just an “orange Twitter.”

I love that question. It’s honest and childlike, and I totally relate to that sort of candor.

Substack does kind of seem like just another social media platform, dressed in orange and with a longer character limit. So the question is valid.

I feel an urge to stop what I’m doing and answer it with not just a comment, but a full-blown post.

That’s typical of me, Stella Stillwell, the editor of Truicide, my budding online presence. (More on that in a sec.)

Like lots of late GenX-ers, my journey with online communications started a while back on a small, Wordpress-based philosophy forum.

Long before Twitter and Facebook existed, I cut my teeth on long-form forums dedicated to certain areas of interest and got used to it quickly.

I tried Facebook and Twitter for a while but it didn’t stick. Both sort of felt like a place to go when you want cognitive shortcuts and slogans, but also want to voice strongly-held views and feel part of something.

Facebook/Twitter works if you want others to see which tribe you’re part of. It makes sense because it’s natural to want to find our tribe or signal which one we identify with.

I’m sure there are tons of legit business or family reasons to be on these platforms, but let’s keep this limited to how they differ in terms of scratching the self-expression itch. I think that’s what Darrenski was after.

There are exceptions, but Twitter/X (I’ll just call it Twitter for this) is a short-form place that rewards the best clever one-liners and punishes nuance, and it feels like this is all by design. For me, that sort of thing sits on a continuum between boring and repulsive, so I don’t spend time there.

Shaving the edges off of an important topic, like we see on Twitter routinely; reducing life or death topics to a truism or quip, feels like shaving off literal body parts.

I fucking hate it.

People fucking love it.

And I fucking hate that people fucking love it.

It breaks my heart. But that’s nobody’s problem except mine. I have to approach that situation with grace and humility. Each to their own.

The fact that Twitter recently switched hands from left to right doesn’t help. It’s an out-of-the-pot-and-into-the-fire thing if you ask me. But that’s not the point. I hated Twitter long before that whole thing happened. Left or right-leaning, I just don’t like the format.

Tangent: never cared about how the owners curated or banned, to me that’s just their prerogative as a private-sector company. Whether it’s Twitter or X, it’s fine with me how they curate. Doesn’t seem like a legal issue to me, but rather a business decision, and the customer can walk away if they don’t like it. The fact it was made into a whole freedom-of-speech under attack thing is annoying. It wasn’t and it isn’t. (Feel free to debate me on this. Just not on Twitter.)

A few years back I went over to Reddit where nuance and longer form is respected and often rewarded with sincere discourse.

Where Twitter is typically derisive of nuance, Reddit tolerates both nuance AND quips with equal aplomb, as long as there’s sincerity and quality.

Reddit communities seem to have a great bullshit detector and I sense a collectively higher IQ than the norm. Plus, it’s organized by interest, so you’re getting a higher-caliber audience, far more focused than just a general majority would be.

If you make a deep comment about, for example, “free will,” in the subreddit for free will, your audience won’t make fun of you.

They are expecting your depth and sincerity, and they are massively conversant on the topic of free-will compared to the general population.

Not only will they NOT lambast you for waxing on about some “weird, esoteric topic,” like they might at Twitter or even around your own dining room table, they will LOVE you for it.

For me it’s the kind of love I feel deep in my kishkes. It’s a pure joy. Like an algorithmically-enabled dopamine rain in a desert. But rain is rain. I’ll take it.

(“A Pure Joy” by Stella Stillwell)

One problem, though, with Reddit, is that after a while you start to feel like your best work, the most earnest and nuanced views—often carmelized at the edges with the glorious heat and energy of real human dialectic—is getting wasted. Snowed over, lost in the heaping graveyards of digital oblivion.

Of course, it’s never fully wasted if it’s seen in the moment by the person you’re talking with and by the sub.

Moreover, it’s seen by YOU. Let’s not forget that the Redditor life, when approached with guts and sincerity, is a great forge for learning what you actually believe and care about, and putting it into words. You just might surprise yourself with who you turn out to actually be.

Plus, all those LLMs scouring the world for new and better coherence chunks for the massive corpus of human knowledge will see and ingest the gold nuggets in your writing, possibly enhancing future quality of the world-mind. (That was a bit sarcastic. But it’s also kind of true. I know a lot about AI and I’m happy to talk about it with you anytime. Again, just not on Twitter.)

But anyway, when you write on Reddit, your thoughts are not wasted, they’re just not organized in a way that can conveniently be reviewed and rediscovered by you, your family, and most poignantly, your intellectual/ideological tribe, whoever that may be.

In that last regard, Substack is a step above even Reddit. You can post WAY LONGER things without being accused of being a schizo poster/commenter. People won’t attack you for imposing your lengthy views on the whole sub; littering it with self-indulgent tripe.

The downside of Substack is that you might not get read at all. So if you want to be read, you have to work it. Tag your entries properly, and more importantly, network purposefully and often.

There are good ways to do that, sincere techniques that actually work for all the right reasons.

Search for stacks and posts that match your interests. The more specific the better.

If you find like-minded writers, enjoy. And support them. If you can’t afford the paid subscription, pay them with acknowledgement and engagement. It matters more than you know.

There’s beautiful stuff here on Substack. Stuff that feels like it’s made for you. There are writers here who share your soul-print, and they are waiting for you to come home. ❤️

So get busy. Read, comment, re-stack.

Have fun writing up your own posts. But don’t expect the world to care, let alone flock to it. Just enjoy knowing that your ideas are now being saved and categorized. A written legacy of your mind. A public cathedral of YOUR soul-print, calling other weary travelers home.

I know that matters to some of you, as it should. There’s no shame in it, even though it kind of feels like there is. (That’s a topic for another day.) Regardless of what anyone thinks, having your heart and soul and ideas conveniently available to others—and yourself—doesn’t hurt anything. If it’s totally ignored, you’re no worse off. And arguably plenty better off.

Plus, there’s always hope that tomorrow you’ll break through, meet someone new, hit the right chord. It’s a good journey to be on, regardless. The alternative is pretty bleak. So get writing. Either way, it’s a win.

I used to spend a lot of time feeling sad about the fact that there are people out there that share my nuanced DNA of values and sensibilities, and that finding them in this life is almost impossible. Such a tragic waste. Because living in a cathedral of your own ideas is lonely in a perverse way. Gobs of useless beauty for a community of one. Made worse by knowing in your bones that your people are out there, somewhere.

You’re not arrogant enough to feel like your work is so special that it deserves a wide audience, but you know that SOMEONE would appreciate it and feel less alone, or more inspired, for having read it, if they could just see it.

Substack makes that possible. It’s not a guarantee. Just a genuine possibility. Can you live with that? I certainly can.

So no, it’s not just an orange Twitter. 🤭

At least it doesn’t have to be. It depends on how you use it.

As a courtesy, here’s a description of Laura’s blog where the original question about the orange Twitter was asked.

I asked the community what Laura’s blog was about and here’s what someone told me, in a remarkably eloquent way, which is common around here. (Image of the comment is below.)

I responded with something like this:

Laura’s blog sounds like it’s circling exactly the kind of thing we’re missing in most of society and as long as it’s not super tribal or dogmatic about revelation or something, then I can get behind the motion of this sort of thinking, and the intention. And that even though I get a little picky about things being clear, consistent, and realistic, and that that’s my vector of approach, and it always collides with others, it’s just a matter of when and where in the discussion, remembering that collision point is always useful so I’ll stick around a while.

See what I did there?

I’m keeping a door open to that world, and leaving an honest door open to mine.

I love that I can do that.

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I’d really love to bat things around with you if you’re game. Here on Truicide, my jam is philosophy, economics, ethics, AI.

Basically, you and I, and others like us, will talk about “why and how to increase well-being and reduce suffering.”

I like to unpack truisms and figure out how they’re too reductive, even dangerous.

I’m a metaphysical purist. Some would say fanatical. Perpetual synthesis. I don’t plateau. I keep on digging. Perhaps forever, perhaps not. I’ll know when I get there.

Substack is the perfect place for me to do this. And for some, my blog will be the perfect place to do it along with me.

Also, there’s no LLM slop. I offer a refreshing dose of organic human writing. So please excuse the typos. That’s sometimes the cost of keeping it real. Especially when you’re writing from bed and have a few full-time jobs to pay the bills. I won’t burden you with any of that. And believe me, it’s a burdensome burden if there ever was one.

If any of this is something you’re interested in, welcome, friend. Do you have a truism you want deconstructed? Don’t hold back, please sock it to me, right now. It might just result in another full-blown post like this one.

Lots of love to you my friend.

Sincerely, Stella