My Wishlist for 12 Substack Enhancements

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Ted Gioia

of the

The Honest Broker

has a new piece titled “My Wishlist for 12 Substack Enhancements”.

His wishes include “Let’s create a music platform that looks like a cross between Substack, Bandcamp, and Spotify” and “Substack should launch a smarter Netflix alternative.”

I agree that these are good suggestions, but they strike me as unambitious.

Here are twelve things I’d like to see at Substack. I’ll start with the most ambitious requests—they probably sound like pipe dreams—and work my way down to simpler ones.

(1) Let’s create an online shopping hub that looks like a cross between Amazon, Depop, and Kwik-E-Mart.

Have you ever been reading an essay and thought, ‘My labubu is broken. My toothbrush is wearing out. I need a new top for my grill’? An enhanced online shopping portal would allow users to flit seamlessly from newsletters to new looks, cornering the gap in the market that is the sale and purchase of goods.

purchase at shrimpwelfareproject.shop

(2) Let’s build the Whatever Podcast but for Substack Writers, co-hosted by

Aella

and

Richard Hanania

.

This one explains itself.

The popularity of longform podcasts where a roundtable of hungry and exploited meth addicts are baited into arguments about gender is instructive, and Substack is well-placed to disrupt the market with a more bookish, high-brow alternative.

The roundtable of guests could be made up of longtime bloggers with fewer than 13 subscribers and 6 likes, and

Aella

could stump them with questions like ‘So without using AI, how would you show a correlation between height and weight? Easy question, go ahead, answer’ and then interrupt them 600 times.

(3) Substack should launch a smarter Squid Game alternative. Yes, we really can do this.

Go up to writers with small followings and offer them a game of dakkji. When they lose, sedate them and bring them to a secret island, where they are gradually killed off in a series of games until the winner inherits the subscribers of the other players.

Game One: who can raise the most money for Shrimp Welfare? The bottom half are thrown onto ice slurry and get turned into prawn madras.

Game Two: who can read an entire

Slavoj Žižek

essay without screaming, ‘Where are the paragraph breaks?’. Few can survive this challenge.

Game Three: who can get Scott Alexander to go on their podcast? At this point, everyone dies.

(4) Let’s fix the Notes algorithm so posting ‘guys… maybe Substack Notes is a form of social media’ will get millions and millions of likes.

I think we need more of this content.

(5) Allow Substack writers to unionize.

If we can secure a four hour work month with paid leave for writer’s block, there is no telling what we will or won’t do.

(6) Let’s have one of those business models where readers can get access to everything for a $2-a-month blanket subscription, and then give writers a raise because of how many more readers they are having to write for.

It’s capital-heavy towards the start, but in business terms the J-Curve will quickly go up, meaning Substack will soon see an increase in its profits that can be leveraged into free dental for Substack writers, and people who do well on Notes.

(7) Let’s create a new monetization tool for the Federal Reserve, where Jerome Powell can give a government grant to writers he likes which will then be distributed fairly among all the other writers.

Also: we’ve all heard the idea that readers should be able to push a button that buys their favourite writer a coffee. But what about a tip for the barista, and the farmer who planted the beans?

(8) Make references less obscure!

Sometimes, writers will make subtle allusions in their work, to obscure novels or recent blog posts or inside jokes between the writer and one of her readers. To make these references more transparent, have the website automatically link to whatever thing the author had in mind, so we can all be in on the joke.

(9) Downgrade posts written by AI.

It’s not just obvious — it’s easy. Posts with zero spelling errors, for example, are almost certainly written with AI, which would be easy for the

Substack Team

to spot if they use AI. Ditto for em dashes, and other robophilia.

(10) Downgrade poorly edited work.

Since many writers have proven themselves unable or unwilling to proofread their posts, Substack has earned a reputation for unprofessional writing. Downgrading posts with spelling errors would give the website a more professional feel, and encourage writers to check their work more assiduously.

(11) More categories!

Have you noticed that there are official categories for blogs about “philosophy” or “business”, but none for blogs about the anthropology of post-industrial birdwatching in the Antebellum South or posts about fashion but where the fashion is more real and authentic than the fashion you’ll find under “fashion”?

(12) CEO for a day.

This is available on many other platforms, and should be possible here.

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That’s my wish list. What would you add (or subtract)?

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