Track Changes

I don’t read any of the old-media refugee substacks, but I do read a lot of chamber-music style substacks. And one of the reasons I don’t quite feel at home on Substack is that while I like reading the chamber-music style stuff, I don’t really do it well myself. I’m too much of a careless shitposter, and the chamber music style calls for a certain earnestness of approach. It calls for a certain amount of self-conscious gravitas (which can easily turn into humorless self-importance, the main failure mode on Substack; one that gives it decided LinkedIn overtones).

From Venkat Rao’s blog retirement post

This sense of anxiously performed gravitas is perhaps the governing vibe of Substack. They’re sincerely trying to make meaning over there. We here in the blogosphere were just having fun watching the world burn for a couple of fiery decades. A kind of psychotic, nihilistic humor was the governing vibe of the blogosphere at its best. So far I haven’t seen anything like it on Substack. I miss it of course, but one must move on with the times.