I’m a writer who used to write on medium, started writing on substack last October. To be honest, I like the business model of medium better. I get paid when people read my stuff. Plus having distribution built in, that’s great. But last year I started posting really thoughtful content that I put a lot of work into, and I would get like dozen views. I had 300 followers and several previously successful articles and I was getting nothing. I get more views on Substack with no distribution at all! So it is just straight up not worth it, in any way, for me to publish on medium. I really feel like it was a bad move to remove the discrete human curation. I really feel like you need a big wheat-chaff separator, so that readers aren’t getting shown clickbait garbage, and writers get distributed if and only if they are actually producing relatively thoughtful, relatively unique content.
> But last year I started posting really thoughtful content that I put a lot of work into, and I would get like dozen views.
I used to be active blogger in 2000s and was a part of blogging community back then. One lesson that I learned back then was that you cannot predict popularity. Those heavy pieces you think will be hits with readers will not be and those that you throw together on a whim about your sock drawer will get more hits than anything else combined. Ymmv, but the effort you put in does not always equal the popularity it'll get.
