The Instagram snark on Substack is getting tiring

And is blinding us to issues we may face on here

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

A few days ago, I was scrolling on the Substack app, when I came across a note written by a Substacker that stopped me in my tracks. I won’t name the person, but to paraphrase what they wrote, it was along the lines of how happy they were that they could build a community on Substack with writing and flowers and rainbows, versus having to pose and shake their bum on Instagram in order to get likes.

It bothered me for a number of reasons, from the over-simplification of how people use Instagram to stapling a morality to what they post versus what Instagram people post, without any consideration of how much work goes into it.

I promise this isn’t Instagram propaganda and I’m well aware of the issues it poses as a platform, but knowing a fair number of influencers on there who work very hard on their content, and who have been able to start their own businesses as a result of being able to monetise what they post, and that this disproportionately includes women, slagging off people who use a particular platform in order to backlight your own superiority doesn’t feel very respectful or feminist.

Besides, this constant need to frame the benefits of Substack within the negatives of other platforms, not only blinds us to some of the problems on here, but it’s also unnecessary. We can talk about how lovely and wonderful Substack is without caveats and hyperbole. It’s a great place to be if you’re a writer or like reading, and I adore the community I have on here, but it’s not a utopia filled with books and candy.

And it’s important to remain neutral, because placing any social platform on a pedestal, especially one owned by a corporation no matter how seemingly benign, is dodgy territory. As I have written about before, there are cliques and networks on here that recirculate content from the same people, and if you are not in these circles, it can be incredibly hard to get your content seen.

Yes, Instagram like other social platforms including TikTok suffers from a transparency problem, but that also exists on here, albeit in a different form.

There are people who come on here having migrated big subscription numbers over from other platforms and will write articles about being successful on Substack designed to draw in people who started with zero subscribers. Others who will write the kind of content that will have you itching to switch your subscription model from free to paid (I certainly have attempted this). Some who will have had a helping hand by being featured on Substack’s own networks, which see a jump in subscribers (this also happened to me).

In the same way someone might criticise other social media platforms for creating unreal imagery and lifestyle aspirations, so too might someone criticise the way people interact on Substack, making it seem as if all you need to be successful on here is good writing and a pocketful of dreams.

It’s not impossible to break through to some of the cliques and networks as an unknown writer, but I came on here off the back of a long-established writing career and having already grafted to make a name for myself. It’s essential to present that in anything I write about success in order to set expectations for how much harder it might be for others to do the same.

When a new writer asks me for tips, I can give some, but there is a point at which the advice becomes redundant if we aren’t at the same point on the trajectory. That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless - I always maintain that good writing will out - but it does mean that sometimes you might have to look to how other platforms work and help create followings.

While working as a senior editor at HuffPost, social media platforms were a key way of pushing web traffic, and so understanding them and specifically the way they worked behind the scenes was important. I would say for anyone using Substack and trying to build a follower and reader base, it’s important to get to grips with this – and it’s not all that different from people on Instagram who monetise their platforms and are trying to earn a living.  

Unless someone is wilfully misleading people in order to sell them the solution to something that isn’t based on truthful circumstances, there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to optimise your content.

I’d advise against going down the route some media websites take, e.g, priming their news articles with questionable headlines all the time to try and get you to click on them – it’s why so many of us who freelance for mainstream papers often have to add a disclaimer that we don’t write the headlines, and to please read the piece before firing off a response. But there are ways to own a particular topic of interest, to tag people in your content (carefully, and with intention), and to actively engage with other accounts to build mutually beneficial relationships.

That being said, I don’t think it’s really possible or helpful to compare Instagram to Substack. They both have different ways of building communities, they prioritise different types of media, they didn’t launch at the same time, they have different ways of monetising their platforms, and they have different demographic splits across gender and age. I use both, and have things I both love and find frustrating. On here, I adore the deeper conversations I have with people in Notes and Comments, but I also love the online friendships I’ve built with people on Instagram, who’ve supported my work for years.

I think rather than looking at it as a this versus that, or isn’t this great and isn’t that terrible, we can acknowledge that there’s space enough for both. The rule I always have is that beyond corporate agendas, social media isn’t inherently bad or good, but depends on how we engage and use it.

It’s a slippery slope viewing things in such binary ways. When I started to engage with social media platforms, particularly Instagram and Twitter, around my mental health advocacy, and published a lot of articles about suicide prevention, depression, addiction and general mental health, both platforms were critical in helping to spread that message. It also connected me to people who’d been through similar things, and over time I built up a community that I love and cherish, who got me through some hairy times.

Sometimes there was the odd horrible message, but blocking, muting, curating who I follow and changing my settings as to who can comment on my platforms, has stripped a lot of that out.

I appreciate that may not work for a lot of people, and some people have found Instagram toxic and necessary to leave. But as someone who navigates Substack, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, I can see the good and bad in all of them. Part of that comes from the companies who run them, and part of that comes from the people who use and engage with them. Social media is…social, after all.